Cuban Migr S And Independence In The Nineteenth Century Gulf World

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.

Since the arrival of the Spanish conquerors at the beginning of the colonial period, Cuba has been hugely influenced by international migration. Between 1791 and 1810, for instance, many French people migrated to Cuba in the wake of the purchase of Louisiana by the United States and turmoil in Saint-Domingue. Between 1847 and 1874, Cuba was the main recipient of Chinese indentured laborers in Latin America. During the nineteenth century as a whole, more Spanish people migrated to Cuba than anywhere else in the Americas, and hundreds of thousands of slaves were taken to the island. The first decades of the twentieth century saw large numbers of immigrants and temporary workers from various societies arrive in Cuba. And since the revolution of 1959, a continuous outflow of Cubans toward many countries has taken place—with lasting consequences. In this book, the most comprehensive study of international migration in Cuba ever undertaken, Margarita Cervantes-Rodríguez aims to elucidate the forces that have shaped international migration and the involvement of the migrants in transnational social fields since the beginning of the colonial period. Drawing on Fernand Braudel’s concept of longue durée, transnational studies, perspectives on power, and other theoretical frameworks, the author places her analysis in a much wider historical and theoretical perspective than has previously been applied to the study of international migration in Cuba, making this a work of substantial interest to social scientists as well as historians.

"Sometimes that's all it takes to save a world, you see. A new vision. A new way of thinking, appearing at just the right time." These words were spoken by a fictional character in N. K. Jemisin's 2019 utopian novella Emergency Skin. But the idea of saving the world through utopian imaginings has a deep and profound history. At this moment of rupture—with the related crises of the pandemic, racial uprisings, and climate change converging—Utopian Imaginings revisits this history to show how utopian thought and practice offer alternative paths to the future. The third book in the Humanities to the Rescue series, the volume examines both lived and imagined utopian communities from an interdisciplinary perspective. While attentive to the troubled and troubling elements of different spaces and collectives, Utopian Imaginings remains premised in hope, culminating in a series of inspiring exemplars of the utopian potential of the college classroom today.

Starting in the early part of the nineteenth century, American administrations expressed a desire to own Cuba. A rationale for adding Cuba to the territory of the United States could be built on Cuba's sugar and tobacco industries, as well as Cuba's mineral deposits. But economics was not the primary motivation. American presidents knew that in the event of war, any nation occupying Cuba would have an advantage over the US military strategies; this fear, coupled with the economic benefit, explains a century of policy decisions. As Frank R. Villafana shows, Cubans were not sitting idle, waiting for outsiders to liberate them from Spanish oppression. A major part of this research is devoted to studying Cuban efforts to liberate their island from prolonged Spanish domination. Cuba had been struggling for independence from Spain since the 1830s, followed by the Ten Year War. During the 1895-1898 War of Independence, Cuba came close to defeating Spain, but a merciless Spanish military effort converted Cuba into a series of concentration camps. Spain surrendered after its naval defeats by the US at Manila Bay and Santiago de Cuba, following a failed ground campaign in eastern Cuba. After the US occupied Cuba militarily, American political leaders realized only a small minority of Cubans supported annexation, and the Platt Amendment was developed as a substitute. Today, most Cubans agree that independence, even constrained by the United States, was better than enslavement by the Castro brothers. However, as Villafana emphasizes, Cubans living in Cuba as well as abroad still seek a land free and independent of foreign threat and domestic tyrants.

Illuminating the activism of Black women during Cuba’s prerevolutionary period Association of Black Women Historians Letitia Woods Brown Book Prize In Black Women, Citizenship, and the Making of Modern Cuba, Takkara Brunson traces how women of African descent battled exclusion on multiple fronts and played an important role in forging a modern democracy. Brunson takes a much-needed intersectional approach to the political history of the era, examining how Black women’s engagement with questions of Cuban citizenship intersected with racial prejudice, gender norms, and sexual politics, incorporating Afro-diasporic and Latin American feminist perspectives. Brunson demonstrates that between the 1886 abolition of slavery in Cuba and the 1959 Revolution, Black women—without formal political power—navigated political movements in their efforts to create a more just society. She examines how women helped build a Black public sphere as they claimed moral respectability and sought racial integration. She reveals how Black women entered into national women’s organizations, labor unions, and political parties to bring about legal reforms. Brunson shows how women of African descent achieved individual victories as part of a collective struggle for social justice; in doing so, she highlights how racism and sexism persisted even as legal definitions of Cuban citizenship evolved.

Cuban-Americans are beginning to understand their long-standing roots and traditions in the United States that reach back over a century prior to 1959. This is the first book-length confirmation of those beginnings, and its places the Cuban hero and revolutionary thinker José Martí within the political and socioeconomic realities of the Cuban communities in the United States of that era. By clarifying Martí’s relationship with those communities, Gerald E. Poyo provides a detailed portrait of the exile centers and their role in the growth and consolidation of nineteenth-century Cuban nationalism. Poyo differentiates between the development of nationalist sentiment among liberal elites and popular groups and reveals how these distinct strains influenced the thought and conduct of Martí and the successful Cuban revolution of the 1890s.

Cuban independence arrived formally on May 20, 1902, with the raising of the Cuban flag in Havana - a properly orchestrated and orderly inauguration of the new republic. But something had gone awry. Republican reality fell far short of the separatist ideal. In an unusually powerful book that will appeal to the general reader as well as to the specialist, Louis A. Perez, Jr., recounts the story of the critical years when Cuba won its independence from Spain only to fall in the American orbit. The last quarter of the nineteenth century found Cuba enmeshed in a complicated colonial environment, tied to the declining Spanish empire yet economically dependent on the newly ascendant United States. Rebellion against Spain had involved two generations of Cubans in major but fruitless wars. By careful examination of the social and economic changes occurring in Cuba, and of the political content of the separatist movement, the author argues that the successful insurrection of 1895-98 was not simply the last of the New World rebellions against European colonialism. It was the first of a genre that would become increasingly familiar in the twentieth century: a guerrilla war of national liberation aspiring to the transformation of society. The third player in the drama was the United States. For almost a century, the United States had pursuedthe acquistion of Cuba. Stepping in when Spain was defeated, the Americans occupied Cuba ostensibly to prepare it for independence but instead deliberately created institutions that restored the social hierarchy and guaranteed political and economic dependence. It was not the last time the U.S. intervention would thwart the Cuban revolutionary impulse.

“Portrays the vitality and dynamism of indigenous actors in what is arguably one of the most foundational and central zones in the making of modern world history: the Caribbean.”—Maximilian C. Forte, author of Ruins of Absence, Presence of Caribs “Brings together historical analysis and the compelling stories of individuals and families that labored in the island economies of the Caribbean.”—Cynthia Radding, coeditor of Borderlands in World History, 1700–1914 During the colonial period, thousands of North American native peoples traveled to Cuba independently as traders, diplomats, missionary candidates, immigrants, or refugees; others were forcibly transported as captives, slaves, indentured laborers, or prisoners of war. Over the half millennium after Spanish contact, Cuba also served as the principal destination and residence of peoples as diverse as the Yucatec Mayas of Mexico; the Calusa, Timucua, Creek, and Seminole peoples of Florida; and the Apache and Puebloan cultures of the northern provinces of New Spain. Many settled in pueblos or villages in Cuba that endured and evolved into the nineteenth century as urban centers, later populated by indigenous and immigrant Amerindian descendants and even their mestizo, or mixed-blood, progeny. In this first comprehensive history of the Amerindian diaspora in Cuba, Jason Yaremko presents the dynamics of indigenous movements and migrations from several regions of North America from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. In addition to detailing the various motives influencing aboriginal migratory processes, Yaremko uses these case studies to argue that Amerindians—whether voluntary or involuntary migrants—become diasporic through common experiences of dispossession, displacement, and alienation within Cuban colonial society. Yet, far from being merely passive victims acted upon, he argues that indigenous peoples were cognizant agents still capable of exercising power and influence to act in the interests of their communities. His narrative of their multifaceted and dynamic experiences of survival, adaptation, resistance, and negotiation within Cuban colonial society adds deeply to the history of transculturation in Cuba, and to our understanding of indigenous peoples, migration, and diaspora in the wider Caribbean world.