In Cuba, as elsewhere, the invisibility of sugar’s labor-intensive production was always intrinsic to the profits driven first by slaves and later by an underpaid and overly exploited workforce. However, no other sugar island consumed more human lives through the slave trade and the brutally relentless system of violence and terror that white slave-owners, their colonial Spanish partners, and American merchants created than Cuba. For this reason, the Cuban government’s decision to rewrite the history of Francisco Arango y Parreño by restoring his Old Havana manor house and dedicating a marble plaque honoring him remains outrageous. Arango y Parreño was one of Cuba’s greatest theorists of racial hatred: not only did he advise fellow masters on how to perpetuate slavery through terror and the rape of one’s female slaves, but he famously advocated a total legal and conceptual “color bar” against free people of partial African and European descent. While Spain maintained white-ruled, racial hegemony by coopting “free people of color” and granting them certain privileges in return for rejecting and policing signs of pride in African heritage as well as slaves, Arango y Parreño argued for another view: “Todos son negros,” he wrote. White supremacy was the only way. Bizarrely, this plaque makes no mention of any of that. Rather, after extolling him for refusing to claim his father’s noble status, the plaque states: “He loved this land and worked to make her great.” Old Havana, 2002.
