UCLA Center for the Study of Women

In this paper, I will examine the myriad and often internally contradictory ways in which nineteenth-century “abolitionist” Cuban elites theorized the culpability and perversion of white male sexuality in the slave system. Their discourse evolved over the course of the century to incorporate emerging positivist/scientific thinking about racial types, including the idea of the mulata as an instrument of social/sexual contagion. This intervention obscured the question of the white man’s sexual volition, as “abolitionist” thinkers attempted to reconcile their presumptions of mulata victimization with a newly cohesive belief in the essentially predatory sexuality of the mulata. I will approach these questions through a close reading of a curious pamphlet, La mulata by Eduardo Ezponda, and an analysis of its relationship to an abolitionist novelistic tradition including the works of Anselmo Suárez y Romero, Antonio Zambrano, and Cirilo Villaverde. Ezponda’s call to rehabilitate white masculinity by purging it of the decadent and perverse qualities it had acquired under the sugar/slavery regime aligns with the political imperative to fashion a new masculinity in the rapidly changing political and social contexts of the late nineteenth century. The paper will also consider how items and texts that resonated more strongly with non-elite Cuban audiences—tobacco marquillas and popular poetry, especially—challenge and complicate the picture of white male sexuality as crafted in the canonical novelistic tradition of nineteenth-century Cuba.