Supply and Subjectivity: Architecture, Black Energy, and the Geopolitics of Industrialization in Revolutionary Cuba
by Gabriel Fuentes
“Sin azúcar, no hay país.” [1] So said José Manuel Casanova, former head of the National Association of Plantation Owners of Cuba, highlighting the importance that sugar monoculture has had in shaping modern Cuba. But where there is sugar, there is coal, oil, and slavery—a confluence of natural resources and human forces extracted (from non-White bodies and the earth alike) and formed through colonialism into what I call Black energy. Shaped by entangled geobiopolitical infrastructures of supply and subjugation—from resource extraction to African slave labor, and from industrial machinery to fossil-fuel combustion—Black energy [2] runs through the development of Cuba’s colonial, and later revolutionary, subjectivity: its collective consciousness formed as an expression of racialized class struggle, a quest for national identity, and global conflicts over territorial and ideological sovereignty. In other words, Cuba’s very identity, as a mulatto culture and a developing state, is historically bound to European and North American energo-industrial empires. [3]
Find PDF here.
[1] Translated: “Without sugar, there is no country.” A common saying among Cubans, this statement is attributed to José Manuel Casanova. See: Antonio Santamria Garcia, Sin azucar no hay pais: la industria azucarera y la economia cubana (1919 -1939), (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 2001).
[2] In this sense, I don’t use the term Black energy exclusively as a racial term but rather as a phrase that captures the interconnectedness of African slavery and fossil-fuel production during Cuba’s development under colonial rule. Nevertheless, I would be remiss not to acknowledge the structural racism that led to the violent histories of oppression, dehumanization, and exploitation of African and other indigenous non-White people under settler colonialism and slavery. As a morally corrupt confluence of racial capitalism and eventual Euro-modern “scientificity” of human classification, colonialism, slavery, and Modernity itself partitioned humanity along a hierarchical and self-serving Culture/Nature dialectic that falsely equated human Blackness with non-human earthliness (and consequently, human Whiteness with godly rationality) as justification for the ownership and exploitation of Black bodies. While the cultural, religious, and tribal connections to the earth of some African and other non-White indigenous people are out of the scope of this article, I vehemently, and in the strongest possible way, reject any contemporary use of the term Black energy that dehumanizes human Blackness or, as Kathryn Yusoff says, “presses an inhuman categorization and the inhuman earth into intimacy.” See: Kathryn Yusoff. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.)
[3] It should also be noted and acknowledged that Spain also enslaved Asians and indigenous Amerindians in its conquest.