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Cuba's Laborante: The Worker as Revolutionary Identity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2022

Marissa L. Ambio
Marissa L. Ambio*
Affiliation:
Stony Brook University
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Abstract

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The laborante was a revolutionary identity of the Ten Years' War that represented those who worked clandestinely in favor of Cuban independence. The repeated invocation of the term did not emerge from a single print source, nor was its usage evolutionary such that each reference responded to a previous one. Instead, writers appropriated the term to represent anticolonial advocates from diverse sectors of Cuba's socioeconomic strata and to grapple with shifting identities. A Latinate term for “worker,”laborante intimates the changing dynamic between elites, the working class, and slaves. This article examines the uses of laborante to show how Cuban identity was negotiated in different but related moments. It also explores why elites may have cultivated the worker, a figure of limited economic power, to represent their aspirations for increased political freedom, and what this implies about the agents of the revolution.

Resumen

Resumen

El laborante fue una identidad revolucionaria empleada durante la Guerra de los Diez Años para representar a los agentes que trabajaban clandestinamente a favor de la independencia cubana. El uso prolífico del término no se debía a una sola fuente, ni reflejaba un desarrollo evolucionario en el que cada invocación se remitía a la anterior. El laborante, por otro lado, fue apropiado tanto para representar a los agentes anticoloniales quienes pertenecían a varios sectores socioeconómicos como para expresar una nueva identidad nacional cubana. Un término latinizado para referirse al trabajador, el laborante intimita la dinámica revolucionaria entre la elite, la clase trabajadora y los esclavos. Este trabajo analiza los usos del laborante para indagar cómo se pensaba el perfil nacional cubano en distintos momentos a lo largo de la revolución. De igual modo, explora el motivo por el cual la elite cultivaba una figura de poca agencia económica —el trabajador— para representar la liberación política, y qué implica esta identidad sobre los agentes de la revolución.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 50 , Issue 3 , 2015 , pp. 157 - 174
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 by the Latin American Studies Association

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