Sugar, Cigars, and Revolution

The Making of Cuban New York

Lisandro Pérez

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780814767276
• eBook ISBN: 9781479874804
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

Winner, 2020 Herbert H. Lehman Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in New York history

Honorable Mention, 2019 CASA Literary Prize for Studies on Latinos in the United States, given by La Casa de las Américas

The dramatic story of the origins of the Cuban community in nineteenth-century New York.

More than one hundred years before the Cuban Revolution of 1959 sparked an exodus that created today's prominent Cuban American presence, Cubans were settling in New York City in what became largest community of Latin Americans in the nineteenth-century Northeast. This book brings this community to vivid life, tracing its formation and how it was shaped by both the sugar trade and the long struggle for independence from Spain. New York City's refineries bought vast quantities of raw sugar from Cuba, ultimately creating an important center of commerce for Cuban émigrés as the island tumbled into the tumultuous decades that would close out the century and define Cuban nationhood and identity.

New York became the primary destination for Cuban émigrés in search of an education, opportunity, wealth, to start a new life or forget an old one, to evade royal authority, plot a revolution, experience freedom, or to buy and sell goods. While many of their stories ended tragically, others were steeped in heroism and sacrifice, and still others in opportunism and mendacity. Lisandro Pérez beautifully weaves together all these stories, showing the rise of a vibrant and influential community. Historically rich and engrossing, Sugar, Cigars, and Revolution immerses the reader in the riveting drama of Cuban New York.

Lisandro Pérez analyzes the major forces that shaped the community, but also tells the stories of individuals and families that made up the fabric of a little-known immigrant world that represents the origins of New York City's dynamic Latino presence.

Part I

Sugar: 1823–1868

1

The Port

Cuba, while still belonging to Spain, became more and more an economic dependency of the United States in general and of New York in particular.

—Robert Greenhalgh Albion, The Rise of New York Port1

The winter of 1823–1824 was relentless, keeping New York’s streets iced and slippery for most of the season. No one walking along South Street those cold days was likely to have noticed the frail priest with the tentative gait of an old man, supporting himself tenaciously on the arm of his younger companion. Nor would anyone have turned their heads toward the two men as they chatted in the unmistakable inflection of the Spanish spoken in Havana. It was a familiar sound on the city’s waterfront.

Father Félix Varela, however, was not an old man. He had just turned thirty-five. But walking on icy streets was not something he had done before, and until he became accustomed to it he relied on the steady arm of his teenaged former student, Cristóbal Madan.2 Learning to walk on the frozen and snowy streets of a cold city was probably not a skill Varela felt he would need for very long. After all, he found himself in New York almost by accident. He was one of a handful of passengers who on December 15, 1823, disembarked at the South Street piers from the Draper, a cargo ship that had set sail from Gibraltar.3 Varela had sought refuge in the small Mediterranean English colony to escape the wrath of a vengeful Spanish king. Reinstated on the throne by French troops, Ferdinand VII immediately rolled back the progressive measures the Spanish parliament had forced him to adopt, measures that had given hope to Cuban liberals that Spain would grant the island greater autonomy and abolish the slave trade. Defying the Cuban slave owners, Varela was in Madrid as one of three elected deputies from the island arguing for those reforms before the parliament.4 Once King Ferdinand regained power, however, the Cuban priest became a special target of the monarch’s reprisals. The Draper happened to be one of the first ships Varela was able to catch out of Gibraltar. He probably regarded New York as a temporary place of refuge until he could return to Havana and resume his teaching duties in philosophy and constitutional law at the San Carlos Seminary.

But the Spanish Crown had a long memory for enemies. In the end, learning to walk on icy streets proved useful: Varela spent the next twenty-seven winters in Manhattan. He never returned to Cuba.

The arrival of Félix Varela in New York on that cold December day in 1823 can be regarded as the beginning of the Cuban presence in New York, or for that matter, in the United States. The founder of two downtown churches and an eloquent defender of the rights of Catholics and the Irish at a time when they faced serious challenges from “nativists” and “anti-Papists,” the Cuban priest played a critical role in the development of the New York archdiocese.

But to understand the origins of the city’s Cuban community, one must go further back in time than the arrival of Varela, all the way back to the eighteenth century. As with most Cuban stories, it begins with sugar. As with most New York stories, it begins with the port.

***

Father Varela arrived at a thriving harbor, and New York’s trade with his native island contributed in no small measure to the bustle on the waterfront of lower Manhattan. The same year the priest arrived, 1823, ninety-seven passenger ships had arrived directly from seven different Cuban ports, more than half of them from Havana.5 Several ships were engaged regularly in transporting passengers to and from the island. The brigantines Packet and Abeona, for example, made five and four round trips, respectively, from Havana to New York that year, while the schooner Blue Eyed Mary made several trips to and from Matanzas.6 In that decade, from 1821 to 1830, there were more passengers arriving in New York from Cuban ports than the number of passengers arriving from all the other ports of Latin America and Spain combined.7

Underlying that passenger traffic were the extensive and long-standing trade relations between New York and Spain’s island colony, commercial ties older than the United States itself, dating back to a British military victory in 1762. On January 4 of that year, during a long and costly conflict with France, the English declared war on Spain because Madrid had sided with the French.8 King George’s forces set out to deal a fatal blow to the Spanish by capturing the city that for nearly two centuries had served as the axis of Spanish shipping in the New World.

Havana at the time was the third-largest city in the Western Hemisphere, behind only Lima and Mexico City, and much larger than New York, despite having no precious mineral resources in its hinterland.9 It had acquired its size and importance because of its strategic location in the Caribbean. It was Spain’s premier port and shipyard in the Americas, the place where Spanish royal ships from Veracruz and Cartagena, laden with the treasures of the Spanish colonies on the mainland, were gathered and outfitted for the convoyed transatlantic voyage to Spain. It was also the first stop for the ships carrying goods, passengers, and news from the mother country. Lima and Mexico City were relatively isolated; in contrast, Havana’s position at the crossroads of the Spanish empire gave it very early a reputation as the center for all kinds of business and commerce, legitimate and not-so-legitimate. As with all major port cities, it had acquired a character that was both cosmopolitan and tawdry.10 The city was the center of Spanish power in the Caribbean, and the English knew that capturing it would be a serious setback to the Spanish and the French, not to mention the possible economic benefits of controlling a busy trade center. Havana, as one historian put it, “was reputedly rich in booty.”11

Because of its importance, Havana was a walled and heavily fortified city. Yet, on August 13, 1762, the Spanish captain-general of Cuba, Juan de Prado, surrendered the city to the English after troops commanded by Lord Albemarle from the naval expedition led by Admiral George Pocock laid siege to Havana in a bold military maneuver that caught the Spanish unprepared.12 Albemarle assumed control of the city as if he planned to stay forever. But after only eleven months, the English departed in accordance with the peace treaty signed with France and Spain.

Those eleven months, however, marked the beginning of a transformation in Cuban history. While the English occupation was detested by the residents of Havana loyal to Spain, the criollos, the Cuban-born descendants of the Spanish, were discreetly delighted to see the English arrive. Eager to expand their economic horizons beyond the constraints imposed by the Spanish Crown, the criollo oligarchy welcomed the English merchants who, as Hugh Thomas observed, made an “immediate descent” upon the island.13 The consequences were also immediate. Under Spain, the traffic into Havana had been dominated by the royal ships carrying the treasure and goods from the mainland, with only about fifteen commercial vessels entering the harbor each year. During the eleven months of the occupation, however, more than seven hundred merchant ships entered Havana, many of them from the English North American colonies.14

The floodgates of commerce between Havana and the rest of the world had been flung open, and the Spanish Crown found it difficult to close them after resuming control of the city. It was not for lack of trying. Laws and royal decrees during the 1780s sought to retain Madrid’s economic control over the colonies, especially in the face of mounting trade with North America. One such measure limited the number of days foreign vessels could remain in Spanish American ports.15 But the restrictions proved futile. Cuba was far from Spain, and the nearby North American colonies were able to provide much-needed supplies. The economic interests of the colony prevailed over allegiance to Spain, even among the Crown’s officials on the island. Foreign-owned ships carrying slaves, for example, were allowed to dock in Cuban ports.16

Two events that occurred in the remaining years of the eighteenth century helped to intensify Cuban-North American trade relations: the independence of the thirteen English colonies and the Cuban sugar boom.

Even in the throes of the American Revolution, the importance of trade with Cuba was recognized by the Congress of the Confederation when in 1781 it appointed an agent “to reside at Havana, to manage the occasional concerns of Congress, to assist American traders with his advice and to solicit their affairs with the Spanish government.”17 When independence from Britain was achieved, trade with Cuba could develop unfettered by European interests and conflicts.18 The Napoleonic wars, blockades and closures of continental ports, occupations of colonies, and other actions disruptive of commerce left the United States as a neutral trading partner for Cuban merchants and producers.19 Leaving the British empire also meant that the Americans had to aggressively expand their markets as they lost the protectionism that the English exercised over the products of their colonies.20

Increasingly isolated by the European wars, unable to supply its Caribbean colonies with all their needs, and incapable of absorbing all of Cuba’s productive capacity, Spain relented in its efforts to curb U.S.-Cuba trade. In 1797 the Spanish Crown formalized what had thus far been a tacit approval of U.S.-Cuba trade through a royal decree that authorized commerce with “neutral” ships.21 During 1798, the year after the royal decree, 431 American ships anchored in Havana, compared to only 97 Spanish ships, and even some of those Spanish vessels were cleared for the United States.22 In 1801, 824 U.S. ships entered Cuban ports.23 “Cuban-American trade,” observed Bernstein, “exceeded the island’s commerce with Spain.”24 Cuba was a Spanish colony, but by the start of the nineteenth century, its ports, especially Havana, were in the service of the trade with the young American nation.

As the eighteenth century closed, another development served to multiply the volume of trade between Cuba and the United States: the start of the boom in the island’s sugar production. What became known as Cuba’s sugar revolution transformed the island’s economy and society and tied Spain’s colony closer to the United States, particularly New York.

Beyond the walls of Havana lay a vast countryside whose full agricultural potential remained largely unrealized for centuries as the Spanish focused on the precious mineral resources of the mainland and assigned Cuba the role of transportation hub. When the British invaded Havana, nearly three hundred years after Columbus set foot on Cuba, one-fourth of the population of the entire island was still clustered around Havana’s piers, facing the harbor, and walled off from the hinterland.25

The nascent Havana criollo oligarchy had largely been responsible for the piecemeal development of the sugar industry in the region outside the city. At the time of the British occupation there were fewer than a hundred sugar mills in the area.26 Cuba was nowhere close to having a true plantation economy on the scale that had been developed in the neighboring British and French island colonies. In terms of both land and number of slaves, the Cuban mills were relatively small, with modest production and rudimentary technology.27 The cane grinder itself, or trapiche, was a primitive apparatus with three triangulated vertical rollers powered by an animal.28

Sugar lagged behind many of Cuba’s other agricultural products.29 Large cattle estates in the east central region of the island had long been producing cured beef that the English and the French bought to feed the large slave populations of their colonies in the Caribbean. Tobacco farmers were already engaged in producing the quality leaves that were among Cuba’s earliest and most coveted exports. Scattered throughout the island were the estancieros, largely subsistence farmers who made a negligible contribution to Cuba’s exports.30 Cuba’s fertile lands were therefore not intensively cultivated and agricultural production was insufficient to make the island a true exporting colony. It carried a heavy trade deficit, especially in its commerce with the United States, importing manufactured goods, textiles, and foodstuffs, especially flour. The explosion in sugar production toward the close of the eighteenth century changed all that. Cuba now had something to sell, and the United States, especially New York, was buying.

Manuel Moreno Fraginals, in his seminal work The Sugarmill, first published in 1964, traces the origins of the sugar revolution to the sudden and direct access by the Cuban pl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: New York Stories
• Part I. Sugar: 1823–1868
• Part II. War: 1868–1895
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author