Racism as anti-colonial strategy: the Revista Cubana (1885–1894)

Book section

This article offers an analysis of the essay ‘El bandolerismo’ (Banditry) by the renowned Cuban anti-colonial intellectual and political thinker Enrique José Varona (1848–1933). Written during the tumultuous period of intermittent revolutions in Cuba and published in the June 1888 edition of the Revista Cubana (a periodical for which Varona himself served as principal editor), ‘El bandolerismo’ engages with then-existing ideas about criminology (in particular the work of Cesare Lombroso) to build a convincing case against the Spanish empire and against immigration from Spain into the island of Cuba. Building a historical, anthropological, and criminological case, Varona effectively turns mainstream, anti-Black racism on its head by turning his reader’s attention to the problem of Spain, and by signalling how the Spanish represented the real problem and pathogen in a vulnerable, late 19th-century Cuba. In this article, I reflect on Varona’s rhetorical experiment within its local and transnational contexts and consider the implications of this brand of anti-colonialism within the intellectual and political currents flowing in and out of Cuba during the fin de siècle. The article also asks how Varona’s propositions in ‘El bandolerismo’ converse with, and run counter to, discourses on race in this age of revolutionary thinking within the island.

Authors: del Pilar Blanco, M

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Host title: Oxford Intersections: Racism by Context
• Publication date: 2025-03-20
• Acceptance date: 2024-10-01
• DOI: 10.1093/9780198945246.003.0072
• EISBN: 9780198945246
• Language: English
• Keywords: Varona; race; Cuba; 19th-century revolutions; Enrique José; anti-colonialism