Envisioning Cuba

Dalia Antonia Muller

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781469631998
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'America Latina e dei Caraibi

During the violent years of war marking Cuba's final push for independence from Spain, over 3, 000 Cuban emigres, men and women, rich and poor, fled to Mexico. But more than a safe haven, Mexico was a key site, Dalia Antonia Muller argues, from which the expatriates helped launch a mobile and politically active Cuban diaspora around the Gulf of Mexico. Offering a new transnational vantage on Cuba's struggle for nationhood, Muller traces the stories of three hundred of these Cuban emigres and explores the impact of their lives of exile, service to the revolution and independence, and circum-Caribbean solidarities. While not large in number, the emigres excelled at community building, and their effectiveness in disseminating their political views across borders intensified their influence and inspired strong nationalistic sentiments across Latin America. Revealing that emigres' efforts were key to a Cuban Revolutionary Party program for courting Mexican popular and diplomatic support, Muller shows how the relationship also benefited Mexican causes. Cuban revolutionary aspirations resonated with Mexican students, journalists, and others alarmed by the violation of constitutional rights and the increasing conservatism of the Porfirio Diaz regime. Finally, Muller follows emigres' return to Cuba after the Spanish-American War, their lives in the new republic ineluctably shaped by their sojourn in Mexico.

1 Nineteenth-Century Cuban Migrants in the Gulf World

In March of 1897, Gabriel López García arrived to the bustling port city of Veracruz, Mexico. In the preceding two years he had left his home in Cuba for foreign shores not once but twice, due to the war of Cuban independence. Gabriel joined the revolutionary movement in 1894 in his home province of Pinar del Rio. When the revolutionary plot in which he was involved was discovered, he fled to Tampa, Florida, to evade capture by Spanish colonial authorities. Tampa and Key West were hotbeds of revolution at the time, where Cuban migrants gathered arms for the insurgents and outfitted filibustering expeditions to transport supplies to Cuba. On 12 March 1896, the Three Friends expedition left Jacksonville, Florida, under the command of insurgent general Enrique Collazo, with Gabriel on board. The expedition landed safely several days later, delivering a full load of men, arms, and munitions in the province of Matanzas.1 Instead of remaining with Collazo and his men, Gabriel made his way to Pinar del Rio soon after the insurgents made landfall, intent on joining Antonio Maceo, the Cuban general who was leading the revolution in that province. Changing between insurgent companies numerous times to achieve his objective, Gabriel finally arrived at the Spanish military line that separated Cuba’s westernmost province from the rest of the island. Extensive reconnaissance proved the line to be uncrossable except by sea. Frustrated, Gabriel turned back toward the capital, Havana, where he took a civilian position within the revolutionary movement. Gabriel’s dreams of military glory were foiled, and he was unable to thrive in a civilian position, where he butted heads with his superiors, so he left Cuba again, this time to return to the family he had left in Tampa.2 Cuba, though, had changed radically since Gabriel’s first departure in 1894. Between 1894 and 1897, the island had been ravaged by a remarkably destructive war that had dislocated hundreds of thousands of civilians. In 1897, Spanish general Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau was desperate to crush the insurgency, but victory eluded him. Keenly aware that Cubans just across the straits were redoubling their commitment to fuel the revolution, Weyler watched maritime traffic between Florida and Cuba closely. For this reason, Gabriel chose to depart for Veracruz rather than Tampa in 1897, and he knew that he would find his way east before long.

Gabriel López García’s story illustrates how nineteenth-century Cuban exiles and migrants concentrated in the Gulf World shaped the Cuban independence process and were, in turn, shaped by the Cuban independence wars. This chapter explores the relationship between Cuban independence, war, exile, and migration in the context of the nineteenth-century Gulf World. During the nineteenth century and especially during the three decades of the Cuban independence process (between 1868 and 1898), Cubans made their way to near and distant shores as migrants, exiles, and refugees. Cubans could be found as far north as Buffalo, New York; as far south as Buenos Aires, Argentina; as far east as Paris, France; and as far west as the State of Oaxaca in Mexico. They could be found in centers and hubs in the greater Caribbean by the thousands and in farther removed locations like the northern mining region of Chile in small handfuls. Although Cuban migrations were Atlantic in scope, the Gulf World was the critical center of Cuban revolutionary activity in the nineteenth century.

After a brief exploration of the Gulf World as a uniquely connected region sutured together by centuries of circulation, this chapter examines the long history of Cuban political exile, beginning in the 1820s. The decades of the 1820s through the 1850s saw the migration of small groups of generally, although not exclusively, elite Cubans. During the thirty-year Cuban independence conflict, tens of thousands of Cuban men, women, and children, rich and poor, black and white, left the island. Some left looking for temporary refuge, while others hoped to build new lives and leave old ones behind. Still others used the space of exile as ground on which to prepare revolution, irreverently crossing and recrossing national and imperial borders and legally and illegally remapping the Gulf in new ways. During the Ten Years’ War, which spanned 1868 to 1878, Cubans abroad created and sustained migrant centers across the Americas. When war erupted again in 1895, new migrants were welcomed in established communities.

The final section of this chapter focuses on the 1895 War, with a close look at the relationship between war and migration. The unique brutality of the 1895 conflict and its short duration distinguished it from the Ten Years’ War. Tens of thousands of Cubans abandoned Cuba in the peak years of the conflict, especially in 1896 when General Weyler’s reconcentration policies went into force. By analyzing the cases of 200 Cuban exiles, refugees, and migrants in this chapter and placing them in relation to the spatial and temporal geography of the 1895 War, we can see how the military strategies of both insurgents and royalists shaped internal and external Cuban migrations, resulting in their exodus and determining to some degree their destinations.3 The conditions of the 1895 War, the emergence of an ever more connected Gulf World, and the existence of long-standing communities of Cuban migrants fundamentally defined the character of Cuban migration during the 1890s. As we will see in subsequent chapters, it also shaped the evolution of Cuban migrant communities in the Gulf and the development of their revolutionary politics.

The Gulf World

The Gulf World, extending from the Straits of Florida to those of Yucatán, bordered on the north side and on the southeast by what are today the states of the U.S. Gulf South, on the west by the Gulf coast states of Mexico, and on the south side by the western portion of the island of Cuba, has been a space of exchange and connection for centuries. Long before the Europeans arrived in the New World, native groups—among them the Maya, Arawaks, and Caribs—explored, navigated, and established trade from the Orinoco to the Gulf of Honduras and out into the Gulf of Mexico.4 A recent study by archeologists suggests the strong possibility that on the other side of the Gulf native inhabitants of the Florida peninsula developed networks of exchange between the mainland and the island of Cuba.5

Columbus’s voyages and the age of discovery they inaugurated changed the character of the Gulf and made it a key region in an emerging Ibero-Atlantic world. Within half a century, the Gulf of Mexico was dominated by Spain, which had established the sprawling viceroyalty of New Spain, an administrative unit that included what is today Mexico, the U.S. Southwest, California, Florida, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hispañola, the Philippines, Central America north of Panama and parts of Venezuela. The Spanish presence in the Gulf radically restructured old pre-Columbian trade routes. The port cities of Havana and Veracruz became critical hubs in Spain’s transatlantic economy during the sixteenth century, as ships moving between the ports transported goods to and from the Americas and Spain. But even as Spain drew the Gulf into an emerging Atlantic world, it also facilitated the creation of new interregional dynamics. The intercolonial trade that ran parallel to the transatlantic trade resulted in myriad exchanges between the island colony of Cuba and the mainland of New Spain throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries.6 For example, there are records of boats bringing contraband trade goods to Cuba from Campeche as early as 1520.7 More than 370 years later, the Spanish foreign minister and Spain’s consuls in Mexico would complain of the small fishing vessels called viveros that plied the poorly defined and even more poorly patrolled waters between Yucatán and Cuba’s coasts, running men and supplies to the insurgents in Cuba.8

Between the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Gulf World changed again as imperial competition chipped away at Spanish hegemony. The French founded Louisiana at the end of the 1690s. Established in 1718, New Orleans would quickly become one of the most dynamic ports in the Gulf World.9 Meanwhile, the British had been expanding their presence in the new world at Spain’s expense throughout much of the seventeenth century. After establishing colonies along the eastern seaboard of North America, between 1607 and 1732, they took Jamaica from the Spanish in 1655, and several other island territories as well. During the Seven Years’ War, which ended in 1763, Britain occupied Havana, holding Spain’s most important western port hostage until the conclusion of the war, when, by the terms of the treaty of Paris, Britain returned Havana in exchange for control of Florida. Among other territories, Britain also gained the eastern part of Louisiana from the French. At this time, France gave Spain Louisiana west of the Mississippi in order to avoid a complete British takeover. New Orleans as a city grew under Spanish dominance and cultural and commercial connections between the new mainland colony and Spain’s colonies in Mexico and Cuba intensified.10 The Spanish period in Louisiana lasted a mere forty years, and in 1802 the colony was reclaimed by the French and promptly sold to the United States. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Gulf of Mexico, once a Spanish lake, was contested by three imperial rivals and one nascent republic.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, anticolonial wars and processes of emancipation fundamentally reshaped the Gulf World again. The independence of Britain’s North American colonies in the 1770s was followed by the independence of much of Latin America between 1800 and the 1820s. By the mid-nineteenth century, British, Spanish, and French empires in the Americas had been greatly reduced, and the fledgling United States of America had secured a dominant presence in the Gulf. The new nation of Mexico still controlled the westernmost portion of the Gulf up through Texas, although it would lose this territory to the United States in the Mexican American War. Cuba was greatly coveted by the United States, which made numerous attempts to acquire the island while blocking several plots organized by Latin American states to liberate it. U.S. imperialists saw the Gulf of Mexico as an American lake and the Gulf Region as an “American Mediterranean” throughout which the United States would project its power. For Southerners intent on preserving slavery, the “American Mediterranean” shone as a promised land, especially before and during the Civil War.11 Just as slave masters leaving Haiti in the wake of revolution envisioned the U.S. South as their salvation as they sought the best way to secure their personal fortunes and way of life, U.S. Southern slave masters looked to Cuba during and after the Civil War. Some of them even absconded with freemen, women, and children they anticipated re-enslaving.12 The Gulf in the age of emancipation was crossed and recrossed by those intent on preserving slavery, but it also offered refuge to those escaping it and to those who, after emancipation, sought rights and dignity.13 Slaves in British territories found their way to Spanish Florida, seeking greater freedom in the eighteenth century, and freedmen and women in Florida traveled further south to Cuba to preserve their freedom when the territory became part of the United States in 1821.14 Simultaneously, slaves in the United States left Texas and Louisiana for Mexico after the abolition of slavery there in 1829.15

As of 1850, advances in steamship technology and the demands of the second industrial revolution, which intensified in the second half of the nineteenth century, led to the multiplication of trade and transportation networks in the Gulf World. U.S. shipping companies were the most numerous, but British, French, Spanish, Danish, and Mexican companies stationed agents at key Gulf ports, including but not limited to New Orleans, Havana, and Veracruz.16 Although the export and import of material goods was their primary business, steamships increasingly began to transport passengers, among them migrants of many kinds—some free and some not so free.17

Claimed, lost, reclaimed, and contested by diverse European powers and countries in the Americas for centuries, the Gulf World has always been home to communities of peoples who have lived cross-border lives, from the Arawaks and Caribs who navigated and explored the Gulf of Honduras and crossed into the Gulf of Mexico, to the native Floridians who sent commissions to Cuba during the Spanish colonial period, to the fishermen who lay claim to the waters between Pinar del Rio and Campeche for nearly four hundred years, to the free and enslaved people of color who fled across borders in the Gulf World looking for freedom and dignity in the nineteenth century, to the itinerant Cuban revolutionaries who t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Announcement Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Map, Tables, and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Case Apart?
• 1: Nineteenth-Century Cuban Migrants in the Gulf World
• 2: Cuban Communities in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico
• 3: Cuban Revolutionary Politics in Diaspora
• 4: Internationalizing Cuba Libre: Cuban Insurgent Diplomacy and the Building of Transnational Solidarities
• 5: Spanish Immigrants, the Mexican State, and the Fight for Cuba Española
• 6: Affirming Americanismo: Desespañolización and the Defense of America
• Epilogue: The Legacies of Cuban-Mexican Solidarities
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series Page