The Corbitts, the HAHR, and United States—Cuban Intellectual Relations

On a mid-afternoon in late August 1927, a man stood near his parked Model-T and squinted through simmering heat and glaring sunshine at passengers disembarking the steamer Cuba. The man was Dr. Harry Brown Bardwell, missionary president of Candler College, a Methodist institution. Bardwell often drove his Tin Lizzie to the Havana wharves to welcome new faculty arrivals and to give them their initial tour of Havana and its environs. This time he met Duvon and Roberta Corbitt and motored them over the six-mile route from the docks to Candler College, which overlooked the porcelain blue waters of the Florida Straits.¹

The arrival of the Corbitts in Cuba gave every indication of routine. Protestant missionaries had trickled into the island as early as the 1880s, but with the beginning of U.S. occupation on January 1, 1899, the trickle became a steady flow. By 1920 the Methodists, the most active Protestant denomination on the island, had attracted 4,700 Cuban members and created an impressive educational system.²

Although historians do not dispute the rapid growth of Protestantism in Cuba, they find its effects upon islanders harder to assess. The recent historiographical trend is to view Protestant missionaries in Cuba as North American imperialists. In his 1961 book, Kenneth MacKenzie depicted the Methodists as spiritual imperialists who believed that the Spanish-American War would liberate twelve million people from hispanic and Roman Catholic traditions and that God had destined the United States to bless these deprived people with “true Christianity.” Yet MacKenzie reserved some kind words for missionaries conceding that they did extend certain positive Western values to societies which they entered. In 1976, Margaret Crahan wrote a paper in which she indicted the Methodists and other Protestants for hindering the development of Cuban nationalism. The Methodists were contemptuous of Cuban culture and believed that salvation could not be attained without Cuban acceptance of North American ideals and institutions. In particular, Methodist schools attempted to “Americanize” Cubans.³

Undoubtedly historians have well researched and publicized the adverse effects of missionary imperialism on an island straining to achieve nationhood. But the same historians have taken no notice of the anti-imperialist roles of Protestant missionaries in Cuba. Fernando Ortiz probably reflected the attitude of many Cuban intellectuals when he indicated that Protestantism was a useful barrier to any unhealthy Roman Catholic growth in his country. Even though Catholicism was weak in Cuba, it was a formidable opponent to national reforms elsewhere in Latin America. In 1939, Cuban Protestants played the role described by Ortiz when they helped to block Catholic demands for religious education in public schools. More important were the efforts of individual missionaries who sought to combat forms of Yankee imperialism far more virulent than religious domination. The Corbitts challenged perhaps the strongest of these as they fought the disdainful attitudes of North American intellectuals toward Cubans and Cuban history. The purpose of this essay is to relate and analyze this endeavor of the Corbitts.⁴

The personality development of the Corbitts did much to equip them for their unusual mission. Roberta Day was born at Blue Mound, Kansas, in 1902 and spent her early childhood years on a homestead along the banks of the Cimarron River. The hardships and joys of frontier life bred an egalitarian spirit in Roberta which was reinforced by her racial attitudes and religious training. Perhaps the most formative racial experience for Roberta happened en route to Wichita. Her mother asked a black woman for water for her thirsty children to drink. The poor but generous black invited them into her home, fed them, and put the children down for a nap. Roberta and her sister never forgot this act of kindness. Religious training was an important routine in the Day household. The Days believed in Scriptural Holiness or that branch of Methodism which emphasizes two acts of grace: salvation and sanctification. Once a believer accepts both acts, he is admitted to brotherhood under God which levels other social distinctions.⁵

Even Roberta’s educational ambitions fed her populist disposition and identification with the underdog. Her mother emphasized the need for her daughters to be educated, and the Days made several moves in Kansas so their children could attend better schools than those in isolated rural areas. Ironically, Roberta’s respect for education cultivated a feeling of inferiority because she never received a high school diploma. In 1941, she received both her B.A. and M.A. degrees in Spanish from the University of Chicago; in 1955, she earned her Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky. But by then her personality traits were already established, and she frequently empathized with the downtrodden, especially if their condition resulted from the lack of opportunity.⁶

Like Roberta, Duvon had a strong populist background. He was born in 1901 near Pearson in south Georgia. Duvon was the twelfth of fourteen children and lived with his brothers and sisters in a log house under frontier conditions. Early in life Duvon moved to Pearson where his father owned a cotton gin and general store. His parents always encouraged his education, and in 1923, he was graduated from Asbury College with a B.A. in history. In 1927, he received his M.A. from Emory University, and in 1938, he was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina. The Corbitts, like the Days, acknowledged Scriptural Holiness; thus much of Duvon’s egalitarianism had a religious base.⁷

In 1926, the Corbitts believed that God had led them to teach at Candler College in Cuba. But their religious convictions and academic interests merged the next year by accident. While registering for graduate history courses at the University of North Carolina, Duvon met Professor William Whatley Pierson who taught Latin America history. Pierson had a special interest in Spanish American colonial history and suggested that Duvon search the Cuban archives for colonial records and return to the university to pursue a Ph.D. in Latin American history.⁸ As Duvon put it, “this is the way I got into a mission school and into Latin American history at the same time.”⁹

When the Corbitts arrived in Cuba in 1927, they developed an immediate affection for the people and sought to meet Cubans of all classes, often walking miles into the interior where they encountered many small farmers who reminded them of their Kansas and south Georgia days. Eventually their travels carried them to both ends of the island. The ministry of the Corbitts among Cubans was that of simple friendships. But they did find one wretched soul to whom they dedicated most of their labors, much of their love, and the majority of their academic endeavors. That soul was Cuba.¹⁰ For them, Cuba was an underdog, a black sheep in the family of nations. Why couldn’t other North Americans see Cuba through their eyes? Their mission was to rectify misconceptions of their fellow countrymen about Cuba; thus it is impossible to separate the academic interests of the Corbitts from their religious egalitarianism.¹¹

Cuba was definitely disadvantaged when the Corbitts arrived there. The island republic suffered from multifaceted colonialism. That the United States dominated Cuba economically and politically has been documented by historical research. Even worse, as Ramón Eduardo Ruiz indicated in Cuba: The Making of a Revolution, colonialism kept Cuban society splintered, and some of the social fragments believed loyalty to the United States more important than loyalty to the father-land. If Cuban intellectuals were to contribute to an emerging nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s, they would have to instill a new pride in their historical and cultural traditions.¹²

In trying to develop cubanidad, Cuban intellectuals encountered a strong manifestation of imperialism. Many North American historians treated Cuba contemptuously, ignored her triumphs, and, worse yet, saw nothing but benefits for the island republic in her relationship with the United States. James Ford Rhodes in the ninth volume of his History of the United States (1922) failed to mention Cuba’s role in the winning of her independence from Spain, viewed Leonard Wood only as a benevolent ruler of Cubans, omitted any mention of Dr. Carlos Finlay’s part in the control of yellow fever, and supported U.S. political and economic domination of Cuba.¹³ Rhodes approved of Theodore Roosevelt’s dictum that “if only the Cubans learned to be good they would be happy.”¹⁴ Rhodes seemed to imply that good meant Cubans should be more like their North American neighbors.

Charles Chapman’s History of the Cuban Republic (1927) hurt Cuban self-pride, too. Chapman supported U.S. economic domination of Cuba, claiming that foreign capital normally controls developing economies of young nations for a period. In this businessmen-can-do-no-wrong attitude, Chapman found Cuba abounding in corporate blessings, nontechnical-minded islanders enjoying a good distribution of wealth, and big business innocent of malpractice. Chapman did not stop with his support of U.S. economic involvement, but also attacked Cuban politics as rotten to the core and even carried his assault to the Cuban character itself. His “typical” Cuban was lazy, self-indulgent, given to sexual excess, and loyal only to immediate family. These traits could be traced to Cuban hispanic traditions. Chapman implied that a good dose of New England virtue might cure Cuban ills. The racial character of Cuban society gave Chapman pause for further concern. He believed that Cuban blacks had faults indigenous to their race; in particular, they were immoral. Yet Cuban blacks were better than those in the United States because they were less boisterous and less prone to attack white women.¹⁵

James Truslow Adams in his Epic of America (1933) continued the unrelenting attack upon the Cuban character. While not as crude as Chapman in his assault, Adams believed that the U.S. principle of self-determination collapsed when applied to Cuba because the islanders were little better than bandits. Adams openly admitted that the bribes he paid to Cuban rebels to save his sugar investments from destruction during the island’s independence struggle colored his historical interpretation of Cuba.¹⁶

While Rhodes, Chapman, and Adams represent a consensus North American intellectual view of Cuba in the 1920s and 1930s, there were some dissenters. Leland Jenks concentrated on U.S. economic domination of the island in Our Cuban Colony (1928). Although American capital benefitted Cubans materially, Jenks asked: “Can a country remain politically free when controlled economically from without?”¹⁷ Jenks believed not. And should Cuba lose its struggle against economic imperialism, self-determination as a principle of nationalism might become obsolete. Carleton Beals in his Crime of Cuba (1933) criticized Yankee imperialism in the island republic. The U.S. government and North American capitalists propped up inept dictators and mandated policy. Beals touched on cultural imperialism when he described how Leonard Wood had installed a North American school system which promoted North American values hardly appropriate for Cubans. He also cast the Cuban character in a favorable though not uncritical light. The Cubans were too given to chance and failed to take life seriously, but they were frank, democratic by nature, unpretentious, and friendly; moreover, no one could match Cubans for courage. That courage exhibited in the struggle for independence must be invoked to free them from the dilemmas of imperialism. Despite the inability of the dissenters to breach the consensus of North American intellectuals toward Cuba, historians of the island republic were determined to present their case.¹⁸

By the early 1930s, Cuba had two generations of national historians. Many of the older ones—Fernando Ortiz, Emeterio Santovenia, Cosme de la Torriente and others—belonged to the Academy of History, founded in 1910. They took a special interest in the struggle for independence and resented such exclusions of Cuban accomplishments from histories of that conflict as the failure of U.S. historians to credit Calixto García for his role in the siege of Santiago de Cuba. They were careful not to kill their patient with too much cure because they did consider American participation important in their nation’s independence struggle. Especially did Torriente view the U.S. naval role as essential in the Cuban conflict.¹⁹

The second generation of Cuban national historians were far more polemical and biased in their studies than their older colleagues. Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring, Herminio Porteli Vilá, and Julio Le Riverend are among the best-known members of this group. They asserted that Cuba could have won her independence without U.S. assistance and that their country had only managed to slip out of the grip of one imperial power into the grasp of another. Cuba, they believed, must win a second struggle for independence. For many of them, the Castro revolution was that occasion.²⁰

The entrée of the Corbitts among Cuban historians of both generations was gradual. Nearly every Monday for fifteen years, the scholarly couple arrived at the Cuban National Archives on Compostela street and spent the day researching their studies. The archives symbolized the state of Cuban history itself. During the first intervention (1899-1902), U.S. authorities rudely moved the archives to La Fuerza castle and sold several tons of documents to a paper factory. In 1906, government workmen removed the documents from La Fuerza castle by throwing bundles of historical records out of windows to garbage wagons below. Housed in three military barracks after 1906, the archive shared its new location with gunnery repair shops. But slowly Joaquín Llaverías, director of the archives, brought order to this paper avalanche. Llaverías became a close friend of the Corbitts and instructed his untrained assistants to give them special attention. The Corbitts in turn were mindful of Latin sensitivity and often pretended to peruse documents which neophyte assistants mistakenly brought to them. Often humor punctuated their long hours of research as Llaverías, a veteran officer of the independence struggle, would make animated gestures when the rat-a-tat-tat sounds of machine gunfire rattled through the archives from a nearby gunnery repair shop.²¹

The Corbitts’ archival research, their publication of edited documents primarily about the Spanish frontier along the Gulf Coast, and Duvon’s articles on Cuban subjects brought the couple to the attention of Cuban historians and John Tate Lanning, managing editor of the HAHR from 1939 to 1945.²² Lanning visited Cuba in 1939 on his way home from Peru, and the Corbitts introduced him to Cuban scholars and to research possibilities in the island’s archives.²³

Lanning was managing editor during wartime and undoubtedly felt the need for a Good Neighbor Policy among scholars of the Americas. This emphasis of the editor had been a stated purpose of the HAHR from its inception, but Lanning geared the journal for an active campaign of goodwill. He established associate editorships in Latin American countries and circulated 1,000 free subscriptions of the journal in 1941 among scholars and other influential persons “south of the border.” Convinced that these gratis subscriptions helped to counterbalance unfair criticism of the United States in Latin America, the Council of National Defense sponsored 1,200 more subscriptions in 1943. When Lanning resigned the managing editorship of the HAHR near the conclusion of World War II, Latin American historians and historical societies voiced approval of his goodwill policy. The Sociedad Cubana de Estudios Históricos e Internacionales was one of those groups praising the retiring editor.²⁴

Both the scholarly efforts of the Corbitts and the friendships which they had developed with Cuban intellectuals impressed Lanning. He called upon Duvon to represent Duke University and the HAHR at the First National Congress of History which met in Havana in October 1942. The same Cuban society which later applauded Lanning sponsored the meeting. Duvon, amazed at the importance accorded him, wondered what a poor south Georgia boy was doing at “the palace.” But Cuban delegates attached significance to his presence and to the newfound attention which they were receiving from North American scholars. Lanning further came to rely on the Corbitts to review many of the books sent to the journal on Cuban topics. Duvon wrote the bulk of these reviews which appeared in the HAHR over the next thirty years.²⁵

The Corbitts were well prepared for their task. As Duvon put it, “having worked with and listened to Cubans at all levels, we penetrated their thinking.”²⁶ Moreover, the Corbitts had witnessed reactions of Cuban scholars to North American reviews of their work. Duvon believed that North American reviewers treated Cuban intellectuals as inferiors—that they “did not know much about the Latin feeling and sentiment and their approach was such that they produced a very bad mood among Cubans.”²⁷ One tactless North American review that particularly troubled the Corbitts was Irene Wright’s criticism of Fernando Ortiz’ Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (1940) which appeared in the HAHR.²⁸

A one-time resident of Cuba and a newspaper correspondent, Wright authored Cuba (1910), a contemporary account of the island; in 1916, she unveiled her first serious historical study of Cuba’s early colonial period. She prided herself on her archival research in Spain and became an historian in the German scientific tradition.²⁹ Wright mercilessly assailed Ortiz’ work, decrying what she perceived as a dearth of factual material. Then she attacked the author personally. She accused him of plagiarism, claiming that “there should be an end to the reprinting by presidents of academies of history of whole chapters out of other people’s books.” She raved on: “There should be a law against the presentation of ‘fundamental works’ which add nothing to knowledge of their subjects because no spade work of investigation has been done in preparation of them.”³⁰

Duvon witnessed Ortiz’ tormented reaction to this review. Ortiz could not understand why Wright had failed to appreciate the value of his work, nor could he forgive her character assassination of him. Time, however, has been on Ortiz’ side. Historians considered Contrapunteo cubano a standard work on the Cuban sugar industry of the nineteenth century until the studies of Manuel Moreno Fraginals and Roland Ely in the early 1960s.³¹

The Corbitts resolved to write reviews that were intellectually honest but as inoffensive as possible. For Duvon, this meant being straightforward in criticizing a Cuban author’s work without being so unfair as to cause a rupture between two communities of scholars. He realized that fair reviews encouraged Cuban scholars “to go on writing.”³²

Sometimes Duvon used book reviews to referee conflicts between Cuban and North American historians. Such a conflict existed between Herminio Porteli Vilá and Roscoe Hill, an historian with the U.S. National Archives. In a series of reviews for the HAHR, Hill examined Porteli Vilá’s Historia de Cuba en sus relaciones con los Estados Unidos y España (4 vols., 1938-1941). Although Hill admitted that Porteli Vilá researched his subject well, he accused the Cuban of ultranationalism. Undoubtedly Porteli Vilá was chauvinistic because, as Hill claimed, he found “everything the United States or Spain did with reference to Cuba … wrong, and contrawise everything that Cuba did merited praise.”³³ Hill, however, failed to realize that his own strong national sentiments colored his reviews. Hill resented Porteli Vilá’s treatment of U.S. political leaders, disliked his portrayal of McKinley and his aides as an unscrupulous crowd, found ridiculous his assertion that Cuba did not need American assistance to win independence, and believed the Cuban historian blind to the advantages brought by Leonard Wood and U.S. occupation to the island republic.³⁴ Porteli Vilá answered some of Hill’s criticisms with his Historia de la guerra de Cuba y los Estados Unidos contra España (1949). Duvon reviewed this book for the HAHR in 1951.

Porteli Vilá wrote with the same nationalistic fervor found in his earlier works and sought to prove that U.S. historians have ignored Cuba’s contributions to the winning of her own independence. Duvon refused to became entangled in this “conflict of rival national sentiments, which tends to produce heat rather than to throw light on the historical problems concerned ….” He promised instead to “concentrate on the specific allegations and statements capable of verification contained in this book.”³⁵

Cutting through the polemical tone of the Cuban’s books, Duvon found Porteli Vilá’s research sound and some of his points strong. He agreed with the author that U.S. policy on questions of recognition followed a hypocritical course; nothing else could explain Grover Cleveland’s refusal to recognize the Cuban rebel government in 1896 on grounds of political inexperience and Theodore Roosevelt’s rapid recognition in 1903 of a Panamanian government only four days old. Duvon further agreed with Porteli Vilá that many American historians failed to appreciate Cuba’s military role in her struggle for independence. And he concurred that the Spanish-American War could best be named the Spanish-Cuban-American War because the new terminology “would not only be a gesture of friendship toward Cuba but an acknowledgment that our fourth-months’ war with Spain was merely the closing phase of … Cuba’s thirty-year struggle for liberty.”³⁶

The Cuban cult of hero worship presented the Corbitts with a delicate problem in their historical reviews. Although they could not accept the national feeling which “put Martí just a little bit above Jesus Christ,”³⁷ they did believe that José Martí’s biography was worthy of study by both Cubans and North Americans. Cubans would discover that the Apostle had more admiration for the United States than they realized. North Americans would find not only the architect of Cuban independence but also a keen observer of Gilded Age values. Duvon maintained that Martí, who spent fifteen years in U.S. exile, should even be placed above de Tocqueville as an analyst of the North American character.³⁸

That North Americans were ignorant of the Apostle’s analysis of the United States piqued many Cuban historians. In the February 1953 issue of Bohemia, Porteli Vilá challenged Yankee intellectuals to examine Martí’s views of the United States. Roberta responded with “This Colossal Theater: The United States Interpreted by José Martí,” a still unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Roberta found the Apostle’s observations intriguing, especially his criticism of European immigration to the United States and his view that America was not a melting pot. But she challenged Martí’s analysis of North American women as overly aggressive and materialistic, claiming that his views were circumscribed by his New York City residence. This tendency to observe the United States solely from a New York vista had also distorted Martí’s perception of other issues, she believed. If Martí had visited the humble beings of America, he might have moderated his attack on North American materialism.³⁹

Another Cuban hero was also the focus of the Corbitts’ attempt to counterbalance U.S. and Cuban views with objective commentary. Duvon Corbitt devoted considerable research and effort to call attention to the achievements of the Cuban doctor, Carlos Finlay, in combatting yellow fever at the end of the nineteenth century. Finlay’s pioneering work had been ignored as accolades were heaped upon Doctors Walter Reed and William Gorgas. In 1959, Duvon nominated Finlay to New York University’s Hall of Fame where the busts of the two American doctors stand in honor. Hall of Fame officials declared the Cuban doctor ineligible because he was not a U.S. citizen. After this setback, Duvon increasingly used the HAHR as a forum to broadcast Finlay’s accomplishments and succeeded in convincing many U.S. historians to revise textbooks and encyclopedia articles to include them.⁴⁰

The Corbitts were unusual missionaries because they ministered to a nation itself. They shielded island scholars from overbearing North American colleagues, encouraged U.S. historians to undertake Cuban studies, and even promoted Cuban cultural nationalism. Although Cuba still suffers from North American intellectual imperialism, the Corbitts made a significant contribution to bringing two scholarly communities to a closer understanding of each other. As Duvon once commented, “I think perhaps that we did more in bridging the gap between Americans and Cubans than we did in winning souls for Christ.”⁴¹

Author notes