Yo soy la reina de las mujeres en esta tierra de promisión; yo soy de azúcar, yo soy de fuego, yo soy la llave del Corazo. Guarachos históricos (Anon. 1882)
MARQUILLAS CIGARRERAS CUBANAS
Visualizing colonial CubaThe best efforts of the revolution to re-imagine Cuba notwithstanding, the visual power of colonial Cuba to signify Cuban identity has never been entirely overcome. How is colonial Cuba envisioned? Across marquillas cigarreras, the illustrated cigarette packaging produced in Cuba during the second half of the nineteenth century, languid colonial ladies served by dark-skinned attendants, elegant sugar plantations, graceful women in lavish costumes, comic African slaves, debauched demimondaines and rakish dandies cavort. Marquillas deployed chromolithography, at the time a state-of-the-art visual technology, to produce multi-coloured cartoons, which generated visual pleasure, a sense of national identity, and cosmopolitan engagement with the wider world. Combining images and text, marquillas depict a wide range of themes. Many of these themes deal with specifi cally Cuban situations, locations, personalities, and Cuban humour. These images contribute directly or indirectly to the project of nation building, and, among them, those marquillas that feature the mulata, the woman of mixed African and European heritage as a central protagonist are of particular interest in the formation of national identity. Marquillas depicting mulatas will be the specifi c topic of this essay, but fi rst we must situate them in the wider context of marquillas and nation.A number of marquillas were issued in series. These include postage stamps, heads of state, military uniforms and insignia of Cuba, Spain and other European nations, fl ags, coats of arms, fantastic animals and fl owers, ornithology, butterfl ies, horse breeds, and typologies of Spanish-American peoples (the latter reminiscent of casta paintings, the captioned paintings depicting racial mixtures, occupations, fl ora and fauna so beloved of Spanish colonials). Other series featured harem interior scenes, designs suitable for needlework, bullfi ghting, saints and religious scenes, and famous Cuban literary personalities.Picaresque scenes of everyday life in Havana depicted on marquillas are noteworthy for their power to imagine the nation. These scenes adroitly map out the conditions of Cubanidad, or Cuban-ness. Although Cuba remained a Spanish colony until the War of Independence at the close of the nineteenth century, throughout the century Cuban nationalist sentiment rose, and cultural as well as agricultural and industrial production, was increasingly identifi ed as a sign of Cuban, not Spanish provenance. Illustrated cigarette packaging brought together the quintessentially Cuban natural resource, tobacco, and the state-of-the-art print technology chromolithography, in a commodity that symbolically and materially represented the nation coming into being.Marquillas cigarreras are small, rectangular, chromolithographed papers, measuring 12 cm in length by 8.5 c...