Happiness in Havana? Día de Reyes as an Emotional Refuge in Colonial Cuba

ABSTRACT

This article draws on William Reddy’s framework of emotional regimes and refuges to assess marginalized emotionality in colonial Cuba and to position Día de Reyes as an important emotional refuge. Día de Reyes, or ‘Day of Kings,’ in colonial Cuba marked not only a holy day on the Catholic sacred calendar, but also a holiday for the island’s Afro-Cuban population. On this day each year, the enslaved were granted their freedom and allowed to celebrate throughout Havana. This article argues that in their observance of Day of Kings, enslaved peoples maintained a sense of identity and agency through embodied emotional performances that inverted public space and social roles. Their sanctioned celebration yielded a collective emotional experience that allowed them to rewrite normative emotion scripts and freely express indignation, happiness, pride, or sadness. The resulting refuge demonstrates the role of emotion in both wielding power and resisting it.

KEYWORDS:

• Cuba
• day of kings
• día de reyes
• emotion
• emotional refuge
• emotional regime
• slavery

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Fernando Ortiz, ‘Los Cabildos Afrocubanos’ in Revista Bimestre Cubana XVI, no. 1 (1921): 19 (author’s translation).

2 Fernando Ortiz. ‘La Fiesta Afrocubana del Día de Reyes’ in Archivos del Folklore Cubano 1, no. 2 (April 1924): 162 (author’s translation); John Charles Chasteen, National Rhythm, African Roots: The Deep History of Latin American Popular Dance (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004), 92.

3 William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 55.

4 Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 129. As part of his framework, Reddy defines emotives as ‘A type of speech act different from both performative and constative utterances, which both describes (like constative utterances) and changes (like performatives) the world, because emotional expression has an exploratory and a self-altering effect on the activated thought material of emotion.’ The Navigation of Feeling, 128.

5 Ibid., 126.

6 Ibid., 126.

7 Ibid., 128.

8 Ibid., 129.

9 Ibid., 128.

10 Erin Austin Dwyer, Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 36–7.

11 Michael E. Woods, ‘Slavery’ in Routledge History of Emotion in the Modern World, eds. Katie Barclay and Peter (London and New York: Routledge, 2022), 464.

12 Thomas C. Buchanan, ‘Class Sentiments: Putting the Emotion Back in Working-Class History’ in Journal of Social History 48, no. 1 (2014): 75.

13 See Ortiz, ‘La Fiesta Afrocubana del Día de Reyes’, 161.

14 Monique Scheer. ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’ in History and Theory 51 (May 2012), 218.

15 Ibid.

16 Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York City: W.W. Norton & Company, 2022), 58.

17 Marissa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 4.

18 See D.R. Murray, ‘Statistics of the Slave Trade to Cuba, 1790–1867’ in Journal of Latin American Studies 2, no. 2 (November 1971).

19 Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring, ‘La Fiesta del Día de Reyes o Diablitos’ in Social (Havana, January 1923), 23 (author’s translation).

20 See Liana Valerio's article in this collection, The Performance and Appearance of Confidence Among the Enslavers of South Carolina and Cuba’, 29.

21 Clarence J. Munford and Michael Zeuske, ‘Black Slavery, Class Struggle, Fear and Revolution in St. Domingue and Cuba, 1785–1795’ in Journal of Negro History 73, nos. 1–4 (1988), 24.

22 Fannie Theresa Rushing, a historian of the African diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean, defined cabildos as ‘highly structured organizations where members, whose values differed from those of the colonial state and plantocracy, where able to exercise control over a limited portion of their lives.’ Fannie Theresa Rushing, ‘Afro-Cuban Social Organization and Identity in a Colonial Slave Society, 1800–1888’ in Colonial Latin American Historical Review 11, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 180. The origin of cabildos dates to 13th century Spanish fraternities, or cofradías, in which the Spanish monarchy grouped free and enslaved populations of African descent together to further political and religious objectives. While mentioned in this article when necessary, cabildos can be distinguished as emotional refuges in and of themselves and merit further research in emotions history.

23 See Rushing, ‘Afro-Cuban Social Organization’, 192–3.

24 Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 55.

25 Juan Francisco Manzano, Autobiografía de un Esclavo (Biblioteca Libre OMEGALFA, 2018), 13 (author’s translation).

26 Dwyer, Mastering Emotions, 38.

27 Manzano, Autobiografía de un Esclavo, 17 (author’s translation).

28 Leuchsenring, ‘La Fiesta del Día de Reyes’, 23 (author’s translation).

29 Susan J. Matt, ‘Current Emotion Research in History: Or, Doing History from the Inside Out’ in Emotion Review 3, no. 1 (January 2017): 120. See also Nicole Eustace, Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008). For examples of the ‘turn to melancholy’ see: Margo Natalie Crawford, ‘The Twenty-First Century Black Studies Turn to Melancholy’, in American Literary History 29 (2017): 800, and Jermaine Singleton, Cultural Melancholy: Readings of Race, Impossible Mourning, and African American Ritual, (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2015).

30 Dwyer, Mastering Emotions, 70.

31 Michael E. Woods has summarized Adriana Chira’s findings ‘that enslaved Cubans who filed freedom suits often demanded manumission as repayment of a debt for years of affective labour, thus rebutting proslavery arguments that loyalty and affection were a natural part of master-slave relationships. By monetising emotional work performed within the household, enslaved litigants destabilized proslavery ideology and transformed individual manumissions into models for gradual emancipation.’ Woods, ‘Slavery’, 463. See also Adriana Chira, ‘Affective Debts: Manumission by Grace and the Making of Gradual Emancipation Laws in Cuba, 1817–68’ in Law & History Review 36, no. 1 (2018): 1–33.

32 Ortiz, ‘La Fiesta Afrocubana del Día de Reyes’, 154–5 (author’s translation).

33 Leuchsenring. ‘La Fiesta del Día de Reyes’, 22 (author’s translation).

34 Ortiz. ‘La Fiesta Afrocubana del Día de Reyes’, 145–7 (author’s translation).

35 John G. Wurdemann, Notes on Cuba: Containing an Account of its Discovery and Early History: A Description of the Face of the Country, its Population, Resources, and Wealth, its Institutions, and the Manners and Customs of its Inhabitants: with Directions to Travellers Visiting the Island (Boston: J. Munroe & Co., 1844), 84.

36 Lucien Biart. My Rambles in the New World, translated by Mary de Hauteville (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Company, Ltd., 1891) 126

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid., 127.

39 Ibid., 129.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid., 131.

42 Ibid.

43 Biart’s authentically sorrowful conversation with the enslaved women contrasts with the ‘constant façade of happiness’ that enslaving regimes often expected of captive peoples. Erin Dwyer explores this ideology in her book, Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States. See Dwyer, Mastering Emotions, 84, 100, 195.

44 David H. Brown, Santeria Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in Afro-Cuban Religion (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 103 (Kindle Edition).

45 See Ortiz, ‘Los Cabildos Afrocubanos’, 18.

46 Rushing, ‘Afro-Cuban Social Organization’, 193.

47 Ibid., 200.

48 David Sartorious, Ever Faithful: Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013), 73.

49 Leuchsenring. ‘La Fiesta del Día de Reyes’, 23 (author’s translation).

50 Ortiz, ‘La Fiesta Afrocubana del Día de Reyes’, 165.

51 Wurdemann. Notes on Cuba, 83.

52 Chasteen, National Rhythm, African Roots, 110.

53 Ortiz, ‘La Fiesta Afrocubana del Día de Reyes’, 155 (Translation by Jean Stubbs, see “The Afro-Cuban Festival ‘Day of the Kings’: Fernando Ortiz” in Cuban Festivals: A Century of Afro-Cuban Culture, ed. Judith Bettelheim, (Princeton, Marcus Wiener Publishers: 2001).

54 Brown, Santeria Enthroned: Art, Ritual, 740.

55 Rodenas, Cuba en su imagen, 222 (author’s translation).

56 Brown, Santeria Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation, 122.

57 Ibid.

58 Ibid., 123.

59 See Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (London and New York: Routledge, 2017).

60 Biart, My Rambles in the New World, 131.

61 Ortiz, ‘Los Cabildos Afrocubanos’, 18 (author’s translation).

62 See Frédéric Mialhe, ‘El Día de Reyes (Day of Kings) carnival’, Havana, 1838, lithograph; ‘Twelfth Day Custom at Havana’ in The Illustrated London News (Jan. 15, 1848), vol. 12, (Jan. 15, 1848), 26, http://slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/item/2801 (accessed October 2022); Lucien Biart, ‘Keeping Christmas in Havannah’ illustration in My Rambles in the New World, translated by Mary de Hauteville (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Company, Ltd., 1891), 130.

63 Ortiz, ‘La Fiesta Afrocubana del Día de Reyes’, 147 (author’s translation).

64 Chasteen, National Rhythm, African Roots, 102.

65 Yvonne Daniel, Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomblé (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 92.

66 Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice’, 193.

67 Ibid., 200.

68 Ibid., 205.

69 Ibid., 211.

70 Biart, My Rambles in the New World, 134.

71 Leuchsenring, ‘La Fiesta del Día de Reyes’, 45 (author’s translation).

72 Ibid.

73 Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice’, 207.

74 Ortiz, ‘La Fiesta Afrocubana del Día de Reyes’, 355 (author’s translation).

75 Damian J. Fernandez, Cuba and the Politics of Passion (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 29.

76 Daniel Walker, No More, No More: Slavery and Cultural Resistance in Havana and New Orleans (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 1.

77 Brown, Santeria Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation, 104.

78 Rod Davis, American Vodou: Journey into a Hidden World (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1999), 349.

79 Shaula Villadoniga, ‘Día de Reyes, II’ in The America: Anthropos (January 27, 2016). https://theamericanmag.com/dia-de-reyes-ii/ (accessed October 2022).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

William Perez

Will Perez is a PhD candidate at Florida State University, 600 W College Ave, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA. Email: [email protected]