‘in a very fundamental way, we all of us distinguish those who are of our kind from those who are not of our kind by asking ourselves the question, “Do we intermarry with them?”’

E. R. Leach, ‘Characterization of caste and class systems’ in A. de Reuck and J. Knight (eds.), Caste and Race: Comparative Approaches (London, 1967), p. 19.

When I first went to Cuba in 1967 my intention was to study its present-day family organization. I wanted to test the various hypotheses developed by sociologists and social anthropologists on family structure in other parts of the Caribbean and examine the extent to which the 1959 revolution had already brought about changes in the Cuban family. For bureaucratic reasons, however, I was only able to spend two months in the field in a small, predominantly coloured coffee-growing village in the Sierra Maestra. This brief stay allowed me to gain an overall impression of the villagers' family organization – the prevalence of stable consensual unions – but was clearly insufficient to understand its complexities, and much less to assess the impact of the revolution, although there were many indications that it had already affected family values in some ways. Thus I was often asked by the villagers, and in particular by the women, whether I had been sent by the revolutionary government in connection with the ‘collective marriage’ campaign, which had already reached other parts of the island and whose aim it was to give those couples who had so far lived in concubinage the opportunity to marry formally. While the women seemed to welcome this measure, men appeared to be more evasive. Also, the local political secretary, one of the judges of the local people's court, and the secretary of the peasant association pointed out repeatedly that as high-ranking members of the community they would have to get formally married at some point.

real colour and legal colour

Ideally, and according to the marriage legislation, nineteenth-century Cuban society was divided into two large groups, those of European origin and those of African origin, physical appearance serving as the criterion of distinction. Yet the implementation of phenotype as the principle of social classification had by then become rather complex. A high degree of racial mixture had taken place which had significantly blurred the visible boundaries between the racial groups. This process of growing diffuseness of the racial attributes was in large measure the consequence of the coloured woman's sexual exploitation by the white man and derived additional momentum from the powerful aspirations of the coloured population to shed their apparently racially determined inferior social status by shedding their typical physical attributes.

A royal decree of 1788 reveals a keen awareness of the problems involved in the overseas possessions in segregating its population along racial lines, and points to its causes:

Social class endogamy was the officially and socially preferred form of marriage both among whites and among coloured people in nineteenth-century Cuba. Most marriages conformed to this pattern. When a young couple, however, decided to disregard established norms on choice of spouse they could do two things to get away with it. They could either appeal to the authorities for a supplementary marriage licence overruling parental dissent, or, more drastically, they could elope. Once the families and society had been presented with this fait accompli parents would presumably find it much harder to uphold their initial objections. Such practice was not uncommon in colonial America nor in nineteenth-century Cuba.

Already in 1780 we find the Audiencia de Chile complaining about ‘the excesses that have been noted there, and that are subject to punishment, of those who remove daughters from the authority of their fathers and take them to the open fields and to a deserted place and keep them there for a few days in an attempt to marry them under the pretence that the parents are against it’. And Cuban popular literature contains repeated allusions to elopement. In El Perro Huevero, a contemporary satire, Mónica, the daughter of Matías, elopes with Mamerto el indiano and later promises to marry him. When the play was staged in Havana shortly after the onset of the Ten Years War the Voluntarios caused a riot: for it was generally assumed that Matías, a cock-fighter and gambler, was no other than the Spanish government, that Mónica was the island of Cuba who endeavoured to free herself from the colonial yoke, and Mamerto represented the rebels.

PRIVATE PURITY

It is surely the effect interracial marriage was felt to have on family prestige which led the authorities to insist on finding out whether the white candidate possessed any relatives in Cuba or in Spain who might object to the match before granting the licence. Some general guidelines which governed decisions on mixed marriages in roughly the first half of the nineteenth century are summed up by the official who demanded that ‘reports be obtained on whether Maria Justa B. although parda is freeborn and her parents are the same, and on whether her conduct is respectable; with regard to the tailor José Flores, who is said to be from Cadiz, whether he has any relatives here who could be shamed and offended by a marriage with the said [girl]’.

Thus, one aspect that is inquired into in the requisite reports on the candidates is the existence or non-existence of relatives on the part of the white party to the intended marriage ‘who could be put to shame or offended by [it]’. Significant is an official's telling remark that ‘the licence that M.'s father sent in granting her his consent to marry R. is sufficient proof of the equality of the two’. She is said to be white whereas her suitor is reputed to be coloured. The official's reasoning is that marriage is only for likes, since the father agrees they must be equals. The law pays due attention to this interdependence of family honour and that of its members. If one member of a family were to contract an unsuitable marriage this was sufficient to damage permanently the social prestige of the whole family.

I shall be concerned primarily with marriage as a focal point for an assessment of nineteenth-century Cuban society. Yet, rather than taking the normal events as a basis for investigation, I have used the well-documented deviations from the norm as provided in the administrative and judicial proceedings of cases where parents oppose a given marriage, of cases where this opposition is overcome by means of elopement, and of cases of interracial marriage. These deviations from ideal behaviour, while by no means everyday occurrences, nevertheless highlight the conflicts obtaining in the system and make its norms all the more apparent.

From the dominant sector's point of view, marriage in nineteenth-century Cuba was ideally isogamic, i.e. like married like. In 1776 the enlightened Charles III had passed the Royal Pragmatic on marriage which by severely restricting freedom of marriage lent legal support to the aspirations of social exclusiveness. While surely most sons and daughters followed the dictates of their elders in their choice of spouse, nevertheless there were also instances where this was not so. These dissidents had two paths open to them. They could either appeal to the authorities to have parental dissent overruled, or they could resort to elopement. In the latter case, the ensuing dishonour of the daughter often compelled parents to reconsider their posture and grant their approval after all. Yet, certain limits were set to the effectiveness of the elopement. When the social distance between the partners exceeded the tolerated maximum, considerations of family prestige came to prevail over the regard for a daughter's moral integrity.