Cuban Radical Transmigrants and the Separatist Movement in Havana, New York and Florida: 1840s-1890s

This paper explores how and why the Cuban separatist movement changed over time, from advocating annexation to embracing independence. Social class, ethnicity (creole and peninsular) and race were as critical in this... [ view full abstract ]

This paper explores how and why the Cuban separatist movement changed over time, from advocating annexation to embracing independence. Social class, ethnicity (creole and peninsular) and race were as critical in this transformation as the competition between American imperial aspirations and the Spanish crown’s efforts to maintain one of its few remaining colonies. For example, during the annexationist period from the late 1840s until early 1860s, the primary participants in the New York émigré community were middle-class creole intellectuals and property owners. These activists sought to break the imperial connections and political and economic restrictions of Spanish mercantilism through annexation to the United States as a slave state. By the outbreak of the Ten Years War (1868-1878), the movement was fighting for independence, attracting more working-class creole proponents, especially in Key West, Florida. After the failure of the insurgency, fissures developed in the movement during 1880s and into the 1890s between nationalist intellectuals in New York and anarchist labor organizers and propagandists in Key West and Tampa/Ybor City, Florida. The anarchists prioritized issues of racial and economic justice, facilitating the entry of Afro-Cubans into the separatist struggle and broadening its appeal across the boundaries of class and race. The project explicates José Martí’s centrality in easing these tensions by applying his understanding of labor struggles taking place in the cigar factories of New York City to the situation in Tampa and Key West. As a result of Martí’s mediation between the Cuban émigré populations in Florida and New York City, the course of the independence movement changed. In essence, New York and Florida were sites that impacted the evolution of Cuban separatist politics as much as Havana.