INTERMARRIAGE IN LAW

In 1776 the Spanish Crown enacted a Pragmática Sanción aimed at preventing unequal marriages resulting from the allegedly ill-understood freedom of marriage. Parental consent to marriage was made a formal requirement for those under twenty-five years of age and/or living under parental tutelage. Parental dissent was deemed justified when it was thought the proposed marriage would ‘gravely offend family honour and jeopardize the integrity of the State’.

In 1778 the Royal Pragmatic on marriage was extended to the overseas possessions in view of the ‘same or greater harm done there by such unequal marriages on account of their size and the diversity of classes and castes of their inhabitants’, and ‘the very severe damage done by the absolute and indisciplined freedom with which these passionate and incapable youngsters of both sexes betroth themselves’. The penalty for infraction of the law was disinheritance. Nevertheless, its enforcement in the colonies seems to have met with considerable difficulties. The clergy inquired repeatedly about cases where couples were willing to forfeit their inheritance and where ‘reasons of conscience’ were pleaded as a ground for marriage. In the colonies the threat of disinheritance was surely not a very effective one. Many who had migrated to America had done so because there was nothing to be had at home, and the property they had been able to acquire there was often rather meagre: ‘the number of poor parents … being large, their sons mind very little about losing the hope of inheriting from them’, commented one official.

THE SEX RATIO AND FREQUENCY OF INTERMARRIAGE

Sentiment in nineteenth-century Cuba was in good part hostile to interracial marriage. Nevertheless, throughout the century some 250 whites were keen enough to marry across the colour bar to apply for government licence to do so. A factor relevant to the probability of interracial unions is the sex composition of the population. Table 2 gives the population figures by colour, status and sex from 1817 to 1862. It is possible to give age specific figures for three years, and to break them down by shade of the free coloured for two years (Tables 2a, 2b and 2c).

Throughout the century, there were 114 adult white men (1827), or 127 (1846), or 150 (1862) for every 100 adult white women. In the free coloured population, however, women outnumbered men. These two sectors, namely the white and the free coloured, generally furnished the partners to interracial unions. A considerable percentage of white males, unless they decided to remain celibate, had to resort to the coloured community for their women.

Some contemporaries also attribute the existence of interracial marriage to the white population's disparate sex ratio. As one official argues, ‘bearing in mind that [he] … is of humble status … it would be difficult if not impossible for him to contract marriage with a white person’.

marriage between whites

The issue of slavery deeply divided opinion within the white community. For political and economic reasons some sectors favoured interracial marriage, but many abolitionists would probably have thought twice about marrying their daughters to a coloured person. Even the common man prided himself on his purity of blood, his sole mark of distinction. One should not think, however, that race obliterated any other criteria of status definition among whites themselves. Differential socio-economic status within their own ranks played a role with regard to marriage, and gave grounds for parental opposition. Opposition to marriage among whites was often motivated by such criteria as birth, wealth, occupation and religion. There was clearly nothing very specific to Cuba in all this as compared, for instance, with Spain and other European countries at the time, where possibly the opportunities for individual advancement were more limited than in Cuba. More characteristic of Cuba, however, was the preoccupation over race which reinforced the concern over ascription.

The stated aim of the 1776 Royal Pragmatic on marriage was to prevent any marriages that gravely offended the family's honour and threatened the State. No instructions were issued, however, neither with the Pragmatic nor in later legislation, on the terms on which an intraracial marriage could be deemed unequal and therefore objectionable. Canon law established a number of specific impediments to marriage such as consanguineous, affinal and ritual kinship. Social impediments were left to custom, and became explicit only when parents, making use of their legal rights, opposed a marriage by their minor children before the civil authorities.

the conflict between church and state

The prohibition of interracial marriage and its moral implications had to be of direct concern to the Church. Marriage sanctioned by the Church was the secularly and religiously approved and prescribed form of conjugal union for equals in Spain. Unions between unequals, however, also occurred, or were at least attempted. The alternative in these cases could have been concubinage, as it was in fact in those instances where the social distance between the partners exceeded the accepted boundaries. This alternative was, however, unacceptable to the Church.

As far as the Church was concerned, absolute freedom of marriage existed among Catholics. From the ecclesiastical point of view the State should adhere to the same principle. There had been for some time jurisdictional disputes between the ecclesiastical and secular authorities with regard to marriage. Typical was the conflict that arose when Pope Benedict XIV in 1741, although accepting as licit the secret marriage commonly called ‘of conscience’ instituted by the secular authorities as an alternative in cases of social inequality between the partners, attempted to legislate on its temporal aspects. By proposing that the offspring of these second-class marriages be granted the same civil rights as those of equal marriages, and thus in secular eyes defeating their very aim, he was felt grossly to have exceeded ecclesiastical prerogatives, for ‘regulating inheritance and seeing to contracts is a right held by the civil republic and the authority of the sovereigns and not by the ecclesiastical authorities who should only attend to matters of conscience and the spiritual well-being of souls’.

This acute preoccupation with individual and family honour is by no means restricted to nineteenth-century Cuba. These are values which seem to have played a central role not only in Spain but also in other European countries before the nineteenth century. Contemporary literature gives evidence of this. Unfortunately, few attempts have so far been made at a systematic sociological study of these concepts. It is only recently that a few anthropologists working in the Mediterranean area have endeavoured to reach an understanding of the concepts of honour and shame in terms of the social order in which they prevailed. Before attempting to draw some parallels between nineteenth-century Cuba and these Mediterranean societies, and suggesting a more general explanation, a short review of these studies is necessary.

HONOUR IN THE MEDITERRANEAN

I shall concern myself mainly with Campbell's, Pitt-Rivers' and Lisón's studies, and in them specifically with the female aspect of honour. While being well aware of distinctions between these communities and nineteenth-century Cuba, there are nevertheless certain parallels which seem to make such an analytical comparison worthwhile.

J. K. Campbell, in his study of the Sarakatsani, a Greek shepherd community, aims at explaining the resolution of the conflict between their conceptualization and implementation of honour on the one hand, and their religious ideals on the other. Sarakatsani hold two systems of values: one social, which prescribes as a paramount duty of all men the defence of family prestige vis-à-vis all other families, the result being a permanent competition for honour; and one religious, which espouses the brotherhood of all men before God.