Writing to Cuba

From 1848 to the U.S. Civil War, Cubans exiled mostly in New York City — from Miguel T. Tolón to Cirilo Villaverde — produced a dozen newspapers and a few novels, the most prominent being Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés. Together they expressed a positive vision of filibustering as a way to better Cuba through independence, annexation, or social justice. The author asks how publishing on Cuba from the vantage point of exile in the United States influenced the cultural identity and political effectiveness of these “desterrados” (p. 14).He finds that they expressed a particularly “transnational” sensibility. Newspapers such as El Horizonte, La Verdad, and El Independiente were all produced in the United States, because Spanish censorship in Cuba made dissent at home impossible. Many put out simultaneous English-language editions of the mostly Spanish-language papers, encouraged their readers to learn English, and circulated clandestine copies in Cuba whenever possible. Lazo finds their transnationalism partly in their influences, which ranged from the writings of Thomas Paine and Harriet Beecher Stowe to the republican ideals of the founding fathers. Some took inspiration from the U.S. abolitionist movement, while others embraced the states’ rights issue as allowing slavery within a hypothetically annexed Cuba.A professor of literature, the author understandably focuses on published sources — newspapers, books, poems, and speeches. In the United States, he notably unearthed some rare — sometimes literally one-of-a-kind — copies of newspapers such as El Filibustero. Thankfully for historians, Lazo avoids the jargon of literary criticism and situates his analysis within historical markers such as the filibustering of Narciso López, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the Ten Years’ War.This study, part of a series edited by Louis A. Pérez, extends the analysis of Cuba’s dual nationality provocatively explored in Pérez’s own On Becoming Cuban (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1999) and convinces the reader more than ever of the “singular intimacy” of U.S.-Cuban “ties,” as President William McKinley expressed it. The book also provides a story of pre – Civil War pro-filibustering from the Cuban point of view that complements the prodigious work on Southern filibusterers done by Robert May.The book succeeds best in disentangling the many threads of Cuban nationality expressed by the exiles. Some sought independence from Spain through rebellion, others through annexation to the United States. The mainstream spoke from a masculinist, white, planter’s point of view that either “compromised on the question of slavery” or else sought outright to boost trade with the United States and protect slavery (p. 7). Other well-bred creoles such as José Antonio Saco feared that the expansionist fervor of the United States would harm Cuba’s future. More “radical” papers such as El Pueblo and El Mulato advocated the full abolition of slavery and social justice and democracy for all freed peoples. The author suggests that these divisions among Cubans in New York — “newspaper wars,” he calls them, perhaps exaggeratedly — largely explained why no successful filibustering ever emerged from these men. (Most fascinating is that the only “man of action” during this time was a woman, Emilia Casanova de Villaverde, who not only broke into the homosocial world of exile writing but also raised funds for revolutionary arms.) By the mid-1850s, their own differences mushroomed along with the increasingly bitter debate over slavery’s extension in the United States.Unfortunately, the author’s most salient argument — about transnationalism — is the least convincing. The author assumes that exiles’ republican beliefs were U.S.-inspired, but they may have come from elsewhere in Latin America or from Europe. Likewise, the exiles did little to blend into U.S. society: they never treated matters of immigration or assimilation for Cubans and seemed not at all preoccupied with other Latin Americans in the United States. The staff of the abolitionist El Mulato also made precious little contact with its obvious allies — black and white U.S. abolitionists. And all the exiles seemed to assume that they would return to Cuba soon enough. Practically all that made them “transnational” was their physical presence in the United States — itself not chosen but a product of Spanish persecution. The author may therefore be guilty of overusing fashionable terms such as interstitial in making his case for transnationalism (p. 166). He writes, for instance, that the production of Cecilia Valdés in New York rather than Havana “complicate[s]” its meaning, but his explanation makes no reference to the United States (p. 170). The means used by the Cuban exiles may have been transnational, but their ends appeared overwhelmingly Cuban.Nevertheless, students of nineteenth-century Latin America and Cuba, of Latinas, and of U.S. – Latin American relations will find in this book a useful set of questions that illuminate both the challenges and opportunities in laying the groundwork for nationalist fervor from exile in the United States

Art · Censorship · Criticism · Literature · Media studies · Newspaper · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Cuban History and Society · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law