Gerald E. Poyo
For thirty years, Key West hosted a radical community of Cuban nationalists who first arrived with the outbreak of the Cuban insurgency of 1868 known as the Ten Years War and, in coordination with other communities of exiles, unwaveringly promoted revolution in Cuba.1 During this era, rapid expansion of a prosperous Cuban cigar industry made Key West one of Florida’s largest and most important cities as well as an important tobacco importer from Cuba. It was a gateway for thousands of Cuban and Spanish cigar workers who participated in a circular migration pattern seeking work in Key West, Tampa, New York, New Orleans, and other less prominent cities.
Cubans in Key West carried transnational interests and perspectives into their daily political, socioeconomic, and cultural realities, founding labor organizations throughout Florida, maintaining busy religious lives especially in Protestant churches, pioneering baseball leagues, and always keeping an eye on their homeland. Cuban nationalist leaders in Key West created numerous institutions, including political clubs and newspapers that helped form a highly politicized and patriotic culture. They also encouraged Cubans to obtain citizenship, participate in local politics, and vote their socioeconomic interests. In exchange for their support in local electoral politics, Cubans expected Anglo Americans to tolerate their constant and frequently disruptive activism, which often involved violations of a variety of U.S. laws, producing interesting political coalitions that often resulted in cordial and mutually advantageous relations, but also tensions and conflicts. Most Cubans imagined their participation in Key West politics an integral part of advancing their local economic well-being, but also critical to their ongoing nationalist struggle. Even the ease with which Cubans became U.S. citizens to defend their local social and economic interests betrayed an adamant rejection of Spanish nationality.
Cuban workers and manufacturers commanded considerable economic resources in the community, and these resources solidified their political influence. The cigar industry was the primary source of wealth for virtually everyone in Key West, and Cubans played a critical role in this prosperity. Tobacco workers usually backed the Republican Party, which often supported their labor demands, while manufacturers found Democrats sympathetic to their interests. Although Cuban cigar manufacturers and workers at times found themselves at odds over labor–management issues, they found ways to cooperate around nationalist concerns and presented a united front advancing Cuban independence goals. Political awareness, economic resources, and social importance in Key West ensured Cubans an important role in local politics as U.S. ethnic subjects in support of exile goals.
When Cubans arrived in Key West in the early 1870s, they entered a community enmeshed in post–Civil War Reconstruction politics. The end of the war led to a general disfranchisement of white southerners who had rebelled against the Union. Northern troops occupied the southern states and Republicans took charge of reorganizing government. Republicans controlled local, state, and federal politics but attracted the support of only a minority of southern whites. Courting former slaves and carpetbaggers, black immigrants from the Bahamas, and white and black Cubans, they fashioned electoral majorities. Already highly politicized, Cubans initially engaged local politics on the side of Republicans. Committed to slave abolition in Cuba, they felt more ideologically compatible with “the party of Lincoln” than with white pro-slavery southerners. They took advantage of Florida laws that allowed immigrants to vote after six months of residence if they filed an intention to seek citizenship, which they could acquire after five years according to federal law.
Republican Party leaders cemented their coalition through carefully calculated patronage appointments. In 1870, the Republican governor appointed Alejandro Mendoza as justice of the peace in Key West and Angel Loño as Monroe County judge. The next year, Juan María Reyes became justice of the peace and the most important Cuban Republican political organizer until his untimely death in a shipwreck in January 1877. Poised to lose city council elections in 1875, Republicans nominated for mayor Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, the son of Cuba’s insurgent president of the same name. Céspedes won with the Cuban vote while Anglo American Democrats won the majority of the council, thus demonstrating the effectiveness of a Cuban bloc vote. In the mid-1870s, Céspedes and Manuel Govín secured appointments as Customs House inspectors.2
Later, in 1883, contenders within the Republican Party vied for Cuban support. State Senator George Allen headed a faction called the Court House Ring, while Customs Collector Frank Wicker led the party’s other major wing. Hoping to replace Wicker as customs collector, Allen courted the Cubans heavily, asking them to sign a petition addressed to the secretary of the treasury requesting his appointment as customs collector and forcing Wicker to defend himself in Washington, D.C. After consolidating his position in Washington, Wicker did the same in Key West among Cubans by appointing Ramón Alvarez deputy customs collector and Fernando Figueredo and Manuel Escassi customs inspectors.3 These appointments were particularly important for an insurrectionary community involved in smuggling arms and munitions to Cuba on vessels departing Key West.
Cubans also engaged the Democratic Party when doing so seemed advantageous. Disgusted at the Grant administration’s failure to help the insurgency in Cuba, some Cubans in 1876 formed a Cuban Democratic Club, attracted 200 to 300 followers, and successfully split the Cuban vote, providing Democrats with a victory. Loño lost his job as county judge for switching political loyalties but astutely recognized the emerging Democratic ascendancy in Florida politics.4 During the 1880 campaign, competing Cuban newspapers entered the fray. José Rafael Estrada, Pedro Someillán, and Loño published El Localista to rally support for the Democrats while a labor newspaper, La Fraternidad, edited by Ramón Rivero, supported the Republican Party. The Cuban Hancock and English Club of Key West mobilized 150 supporters for the Democratic presidential ticket. Democrats won the municipal election with less than a 200-vote majority and in the November presidential elections even Manuel Escassi, a Cuban Republican candidate for the state assembly, failed to attract Cuban Democrats and lost with the rest of the Republican ticket. After the election, the Executive Council of the Monroe County Democratic Party rewarded Loño with an appointment to its ranks, and several other prominent Cubans also joined the party, including prominent cigar manufacturer Teodoro Pérez and merchant Carlos Recio.5
Cubans even experimented with nontraditional parties. In November 1882, Fernando Figueredo stood for Monroe County representative to the Florida Assembly as a member of a dissident Independent Party that challenged Republicans and Democrats. Except for one popular Anglo American Independent Party candidate, who attracted sufficient Democratic votes to win a U.S. Senate seat, Independents, including Figueredo, lost to Democrats but defeated Republican candidates.6
Initially many Floridians resented the important role played by Cubans and other immigrants in Key West, county, and state politics. In 1876, for example, the Key of the Gulf declared, “[T]he idea that foreigners, seeking a temporary refuge on our shores from oppression, should be allowed to control our State, is revolting and antagonistic to every feeling of free and popular government.” It continued, “We believe in the permanent residents of any country or state dictating its policy.”7 Another newspaper, The Key West Dispatch, followed with a complaint that “there are already far too many people on the island. Everybody is in everybody’s way.”8 While the Dispatch rabidly opposed black Bahamian immigrants, its calmer coverage of Cubans reflected a realization of their growing political power. In fact, Florida newspapers learned to be careful how they wrote about Cubans, fearing political repercussions. One newspaper using the phrase “the scum of the contiguous West India Islands” in referring to recent immigrants to Key West felt compelled to explain that it meant only “the ignorant ‘Bahama Negroes.’” “The Cubans are not Negroes,” it declared despite their obvious racial diversity, “nor [are they] to be confounded with the ‘scum’ which floats to our shores from the Bahamas group and floats off again according to circumstances.”9
In 1880, Spain finally pacified Cuba and only a handful of small insurgent groups remained active in the countryside, but in Key West, nationalist leaders continued to agitate for revolution and reorganized the community into an even more militant center. In his newspaper El Yara, leading nationalist leader José D. Poyo unceasingly encouraged insurrection, and tobacco workers and cigar manufacturers contributed funds for a variety of revolutionary activities. Cuban militants essentially operated with impunity until 1884, when national political realities impinged on local politics in Key West. In late 1883, Carlos Aguero, a veteran of the Ten Years War who had continued guerrilla operations and remained in touch with Key West’s revolutionary community, arrived to raise resources and expand his operations. Alerted to Aguero’s arrival by their consul, Spanish diplomats in Washington, D.C., immediately submitted an extradition request characterizing him as a common bandit guilty of “rapine, arson, highway robbery and murder.”10 Ordinarily such a request would have caused little stir in Washington, but high-profile government trade negotiations with Spain produced action. Throughout the 1880s, the Republican Party advocated greater U.S. commerce and economic involvement with Latin America, which in 1889 culminated in the first Inter-American Conference. Especially interested in expanding trade with Cuba, during 1883 officials of the Chester A. Arthur administration were in negotiations with Spain to reduce tariffs across the board, including on sugar and tobacco, and the Aguero case threatened to complicate matters.11 In January 1884, the administration instructed Key West District Attorney George B. Patterson to arrest Aguero and consider the extradition request in the U.S. District Court presided over by Judge James W. Locke.12 Though Democrats controlled state and local politics, Republican federal officials in Key West faced the ticklish challenge of enforcing the neutrality laws and prosecuting those sponsoring Aguero’s activities.
While the revolutionary leader languished in prison, an outraged Cuban community protested Aguero’s arrest, mobilized, and flexed its political muscle. Democrats took advantage of the situation to attract Cuban support when in February Senator Wilkinson Call of Florida offered a resolution in the U.S. Senate characterizing the extradition request as politically motivated and demanded the president prevent the delivery of Aguero.13 Trying to outdo Democratic politicians, Republican District Attorney Patterson cited a lack of evidence proving Aguero a common criminal and on February 21, Republican Judge Locke formally rejected the extradition request and freed the insurgent activist.14
A jubilant Cuban community took to the streets. After a special lunch for Aguero hosted by the nationalist leaders at the offices of El Yara, a large crowd proceeded to the San Carlos Community Center, where they celebrated the insurgent chief and Cuba Libre. Another Cuban nationalist newspaper, La Voz de Hatuey, declared that a freed Aguero planned to leave immediately for Cuba to launch a new war against Spanish colonialism and would be joined by the much-admired and better-known military chieftains Generals Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo. “Therefore,” declared the newspaper, “let’s work with fervor, do what we can,” and in the future the historical record would gloriously highlight Cuba’s Key West émigrés.15 A representative of the sheriff, a former slave, spoke in support of Cuban freedom and against the “tyrannical Spanish government.” Accompanied by the Libertad brass band, the crowd then paraded through the streets demonstrating their appreciation to the supportive local politicians. They stopped before the homes of Aguero’s defense attorney and Florida Lieutenant Governor Livingston W. Bethel, District Attorney Patterson, and Customs House Collector Frank Wicker, who openly sympathized with the nationalists. Mounting a stage erected on Front Street, Aguero and others spoke, and later at San Carlos several Republican Party officials also offered their sympathetic thoughts about Cuban independence.16 Throughout the day, the revolutionary committee received funds to send Aguero to Cuba, including $100 from Wicker in flagrant violation of his obligation to detain military expeditions.
Aguero’s clandestine departure on April 1 incensed the Spanish consul, who complained to Washington about the complicity of local officials with the revolutionaries, especially implicating Wicker and his Cuban employees Figueredo and Escassi for their lax enforcement of the neutrality laws. Unfortunately for Wicker, President Arthur’s interest in negotiating the reciprocity treaty with Spain outweighed his willingness to support the Republican Party’s interests in southern Florida, and the treasury secretary sent special agents to Key West to ensure proper coastal enforcement. In late April, the U.S. Senate removed Wicker from office as a warning to local Republican appointees to uphold the nation’s laws.17
Spanish consular complaints and more warnings from Washington again reluctantly pushed Patterson into action. The district attorney filed neutrality-violation charges against the now-absent Aguero, as well as everyone involved. Emilo Díaz and Bruno Alfonso faced charges for facilitating the departure; Clinton Shavers, who owned the vessel, was arrested and had his ship confiscated; and Poyo, in charge of the overall operation, received notice of his pending arrest.18 Further actions followed against the Cuban insurrectionists, with arrests of Cubans involved in stocking arms, munitions, and explosives. On June 11, 1884, Wicker’s successor orchestrated the arrest of Federico Gil Marrero, who arrived on a steamer from New York with 100 explosive caps, 500 feet of fuse, and “a dangerous substance called mealed powder, which same were not duly packed and marked as required by law.” He also possessed 12 glass tubes, four thermometers, mercury, and alcohol for use in manufacturing dynamite. Charged and arraigned on July 2, Marrero posted a $1,000 bond.19 Poyo was also accused of storing a large cache of weapons, munitions, and dynamite in his home.20
The cases came before Judge Locke’s U.S. District Court, but the Cuban community’s political influence prevailed. On June 16, the judge refused without comment Patterson’s request for a warrant against Poyo, clearing him of any further action. Citing his absence from the city, the court dismissed Aguero’s case. While the court did arrest and place on trial activists Díaz, Alfono, and Shavers, local juries convicted only Díaz, who received a sentence of eight months in prison and a $500 fine.21 The prosecution had no better luck in the dynamite cases. The jury found Marrero not guilty, and several days later Judge Locke returned all the seized items.22 Not very confident of a victory, the court again dropped weapons charges against Poyo. Frustrated at the verdicts and Locke’s return of evidence to Marrero, the Spanish consul commented to his superiors that “the court has yet to find anyone guilty of crimes committed against our government.”23 The Key West courts rarely convicted Cuban nationalists.
Despite the pressure from Washington, Cubans, recognizing that local officials had not pursued the cases with much enthusiasm, rewarded them at the polls that fall. Cubans helped elect Democratic Lieutenant Governor Bethel mayor of Key West as well as Republican Judge Locke to the U.S. Congress, but just to ensure that local politicians recognized their continuing electoral importance, Cubans in a bloc vote seated Fernando Figueredo in the State Assembly, the first Cuban elected to the Florida legislature.24 Among Figueredo’s first acts in Tallahassee was to sponsor a resolution asking the U.S. Congress to defeat the reciprocal trade agreement and protect Florida’s tobacco industry, which was threatened by the contemplated 50 percent reduction in tariffs on cigars.25 As Tallahassee’s Weekly Floridian reported, “There is much anxiety in Key West. . . . as the reduction of the duty would tend to break down the manufacture of cigars, the principal industry in the city and chief source of prosperity.”26 More to the point, the Cuban nationalist community stood to lose its most important source of revolutionary funds. National elections in November 1884 resulted in the presidency of Democrat Grover Cleveland, who, to the relief of Key West’s cigar industry, promptly tabled the treaty and reduced the pressure on local federal authorities to monitor their Cuban citizens.
Throughout the mid-1880s, Anglo American politicians finessed the complications arising from Aguero’s activities and benefited from Cuban political support, but attitudes and circumstances changed in the face of new developments. After 1885, immigration from Cuba increased, bringing to Key West scores of what Anglo Americans, and some Cubans, considered unsavory nationalist and radical anarchist labor activists intent on creating mischief. Cubans arriving in the late 1880s included a significant number of men who operated on a blurred border between banditry and nationalist-inspired guerrilla operations. The Ten Years War had left the Cuban countryside devastated, and many lived as common bandits and highwaymen, raiding and robbing small towns and plantations. When the Spanish authorities countered with increased military pressure that culminated in the imposition of martial law in the provinces of Havana, Matanzas, Santa Clara, and Pinar del Rio, many departed for Key West, where they found jobs in the cigar factories and were politicized in the nationalist community.
Key West’s traditional nationalist leaders encouraged them to return to Cuba and use their unconventional skills to raise funds for the independence movement. Key West revolutionary leaders, most prominently Poyo and Juan Fernández Ruz, sponsored one such personality, Manuel García, who infiltrated Cuba in 1887 and initiated operations that lasted until his death at the outbreak of the independence war in 1895.27 Though the Spanish labeled García a bandit for his raids, kidnappings, and ransom demands and issued warrants for his arrest, he sent considerable sums of money to Key West to support nationalist activities. García’s followers and supporters in Key West did what they could to raise funds locally and send reinforcements.28
Media reports about these activities created a generally negative image of Key West, as did testimonies from visitors and the Spanish consul in Key West. Spanish newspapers in Cuba and some of the English-language press in Florida characterized the Cuban community as infested with criminals. Referring to Key West as a “nido de sabandijas” (nest of vermin), one Spanish observer who visited in 1889 declared that the town was “nothing notable.” “On disembarking,” he explained, “it appears as if one had entered some of the most reeking neighborhoods in Havana.” Cuban Key West offended his sensibilities as he contemplated “the uproar, disorder, and squalid licentiousness of that heterogeneous group of men, women, youngsters, blacks, mulattos, undefined, and whites chattering endlessly at the docks.” He completed his comparison of “these low classes of Key West with their similar types in the capital of the island of Cuba,” observing that the “groups of unemployed on the corners” and the “bums in the barrooms possessed identical language styles and absolutely similar vices.” The only reason this visitor even bothered to disembark at Key West on his return to Havana from New York, he claimed, was to satisfy his curiosity, to see the place so well known in Cuba as a center of bandits and pirates.29
Many Anglo American citizens of Key West, or “Conchs” as they called themselves, agreed that bad elements within the Cuban community harmed Key West’s reputation and business environment. They thought that nationalist and anarchist radicals provoked the departure of many cigar entrepreneurs to the Tampa Bay area during 1888 and 1889, directly threatening Key West’s commercial dominance in the tobacco trade. Though Cuban nationalist and labor activists had different and often competing agendas and frequently fell into bitter disagreements, Anglo Americans did not distinguish, seeing them all as troublemakers. A few Anglo American businessmen, including a few Spaniards and Cubans, resorted to threats of lynching and deportation. Tampa’s leadership implemented such tactics with considerable success in early 1887 to rid their community of troublesome Cuban nationalists they considered detrimental, a strategy Key West then adopted.30
The Key West Board of Trade (Chamber of Commerce) took action in 1888 after a Spanish cigar manufacturer, Celestino Palacio, complained that Cuban refugees had demanded “loans or donations” from him and other manufacturers for their nationalist activities. The board unanimously adopted a resolution stating that “all such lawless intimidators are hereby informed that they are known by name and character, and that they be warned to immediately cease all such illegal demands and menace,” and demanded from the authorities “a most vigorous prosecution” of anyone violating the resolution. Taking their cue from the Board of Trade, local officials took immediate action against those already identified and characterized as “criminals” and threatened to deport them to Cuba. During April and May, the sheriff arrested nationalist activists Emilio Díaz and Emilio García and scheduled them for trial in November. Another well-known activist, Perico Torres, and some of his followers also suffered arrest, but they posted bond. Isidoro Leijas and José Rodríguez left for Nassau before their arrest, while several others left for Tampa and Jacksonville. Spanish authorities actively sought most of these men whose experience with rebel groups in Cuba certainly operated between nationalism and banditry.31
Charles B. Pendleton, former state senator and editor of Key West’s Equator Democrat, took an aggressive stance against the Cubans. Pendleton reprinted a Havana newspaper report that “the bandit Leijas” in Key West had threatened a Havana resident with kidnapping if he did not respond to his demands for money.32 When nationalist José R. Estrada’s Key West newspaper La Propaganda protested and condemned the Board of Trade’s actions and threats to lynch Cubans, the Equator Democrat observed that the newspaper’s effort to “borrow sympathy for these men” was unwise and “is treading upon dangerous ground for its own reputation.” “We are no advocate of such means, but these scoundrels have gone further than lynching, they have assassinated,” referring to murder charges Emilio García and Leijas had faced in Tampa during 1887 of which they were acquitted. All this focus on Leijas led British authorities in Nassau to arrest him at the insistence of authorities in Cuba, but Leijas hanged himself in his cell rather than face Spanish justice.33 More to the point, Pendleton claimed that the activities of the two and others like them “have also driven from this city men who contributed largely to our growth and development.” He blamed nationalist activists for the departure or pending relocation of numerous manufacturers to Tampa, including Ybor, Lozano Pendas & Co., Palacios, and Villamil Pino & Co. Key West did not yet fully recognize Tampa’s real economic comparative advantage that provoked the continual relocation of factories, regardless of the activities of the Cuban nationalists.34
A general strike in the Key West cigar industry the next year further aggravated the growing discord between Cubans and Anglo Americans. When the strike began and more manufacturers threatened to move to Tampa, the Board of Trade again took action. It sent a message to the most prominent strike leader, Enrique Messonier, demanding that he meet them at the Key West Bank. Known as the “capitán de los linchadores,” Peter Knight greeted Messonier at the bank door and “in a violent tone and impertinent manners told him in English . . . to present himself in the department to which he had been called.” Knight ushered him into a room where he met with prominent businessmen, including Pendleton, who said they could not vouch for his safety and ordered him to leave town. At first, Messonier resisted and went to City Hall to file a complaint, but in the presence of the mayor and police chief, the city secretary reiterated the order and the local militia escorted him to the dock. Shortly, other members of the strike-organizing committee received similar warnings.35
These actions by the Board of Trade represented a shift in the traditionally tolerant attitudes of the local Anglo American political and economic establishment, a shift that many Cubans resented and condemned. Nationalist leaders reacted angrily, including El Yara. Even though Poyo disagreed with Messonier’s anarchist affiliation, which threatened nationalist ascendancy among workers, he protested the assaults of the business community on the Cubans. “The injustice committed against D. Enrique Messonier by individuals of the Chamber of Commerce of this city not only violates the constitution and the laws of the United States, but establishes a threatening precedent.” El Yara declared, “From the moment a citizen is left at the mercy of a coterie that arbitrarily pistol-whips the laws, there can be no liberty, security, no recourse in civil society, since arbitrary action against one is arbitrary action against all.”36
Another Cuban vented his anger in a Havana newspaper, characterizing the “Yankees de Cayo Hueso” as “old southern Confederates, eternal enemies of the Union, and animated with an unchanging and formidable hate of the colored race.” They prohibited marriage between whites and blacks, threatening ministers with a loss of privilege to celebrate marriages and a $1,000 fine. The mayor of Key West, he added, enjoyed extraordinary powers to imprison people accused of public drunkenness and put them to work in chains on city streets without even making formal charges or going to court. The “Yankees,” he further noted, considered Cuban workers an “inferior race, almost the same as the negroes of Nassau who have been the object of the worst and harshest treatment that can be conceived.”37
Once again, in light of these conflicts, ethnic resentments filtered into the electoral arena in 1888, and the Cuban community sent a strong message to Anglo Americans. Well-known Cuban nationalist activists stood for election in both parties that year to the Florida House of Representatives. Cigar maker and associate editor of El Yara Manuel P. Delgado ran as a Democrat while Dr. Manuel Moreno, who had also prominently backed guerrilla fighter Manuel García, offered his candidacy as a Republican. The November elections resulted in a victory for both Cubans, who defeated their Anglo American opponents in a close contest. An ethnic bloc–vote delivered both seats to the Cuban candidates as well as a caution to Anglo American politicians, rejecting their high-handed approach to resolving concerns about the Cuban community.38 Cubans again demonstrated their determination to defend exile goals and interests through ethnic activism in the political system.
The usually contained tensions between Cubans and Anglo Americans exploded into open conflict with the onset of the national economic downturn of 1893, which ruptured what remained of the coexistence between Anglo American economic interests and Cuban nationalist goals. Since January 1892, the Cuban nationalist movement, now headed by prominent New York activist José Martí, had grown more powerful with the founding in Key West of the Cuban Revolutionary Party (PRC). Poyo headed the party’s local council and oversaw the creation of an effective fundraising system in the cigar factories that provided resources for a large military expedition Martí secretly organized. In most factories, workers contributed enthusiastically, and Cuban manufacturers generally went along, but many resented the arrangement. Workers opposed to or ambivalent about nationalist politics also had to contribute in the factories in order to secure employment while many non-Cuban businessmen protested nationalist interference in their enterprises.
Whenever Martí visited Key West’s highly politicized factories, manufacturers braced for interruptions in their production. In July 1892, for example, accompanied by local PRC commissions, dozens of workers, and much fanfare, Martí visited numerous factories, delivering speeches and raising money. After his departure, the local correspondent of the trade newspaper Tobacco Leaf declared, “Peace reigns at last.” “For the first time in three weeks,” the correspondent explained, “the work of the cigar makers has been uninterrupted by demonstrations of the Cuban revolutionists.”39
This increased nationalist activity in the factories combined with difficult economic conditions in 1893 provoked tensions in the community. Problems began when manufacturers facing a rapidly declining demand for cigars imposed a unilateral reduction in wages, provoking a number of strikes. As the year’s end approached, La Rosa Española, one of Key West’s largest factories owned by German entrepreneur William Seidenberg, tried to reopen after a short strike, but workers refused to return when they learned that the company had recruited thirteen Spanish workers in Havana at lower wages. The PRC expressed solidarity with the workers, viewing the arrival of Spanish labor as a threat to the integrity of the Cuban nationalist community, and called for a reasonable negotiated solution to the general strike. Seidenberg appealed to the Key West Board of Trade, threatening to move operations to Tampa if the board failed to confront striking workers and facilitate the importation of Spanish workers directly from Havana. Fierce competition with Tampa and other Florida cigar communities like Jacksonville and Ocala increased daily, convincing Key West officials of the need to control labor and break the power of the PRC in the factories. Though they expected a strong reaction from the unions and the PRC leadership, they feared greater problems if Seidenberg left Key West.
On January 2, 1894, a special PRC crisis commission composed of Poyo, Figueredo, Manuel P. Delgado, Teodoro Pérez, and Miguel A. Zaldívar joined a multitude including several Protestant ministers and their congregations at the docks, where an armed police contingent awaited the arrival of a steamer from Havana with about one hundred Spanish cigar workers. Also on hand was the Partida La Tranca, a Cuban vigilante group traditionally dedicated to intimidating Spaniards attempting to disembark in Key West, and dozens of Ten Years War veterans.40 Among the first to disembark was Seidenberg himself and the delegation of the Key West Board of Trade that had traveled to Havana in late December to negotiate directly with the Spanish captain general for permission to recruit workers. The delegation included the mayor, collector of customs, federal and county judges, and prominent religious and business leaders. They wanted only Spanish workers unsympathetic to the Cuban nationalist cause and guaranteed them protection, which the Spanish government applauded and believed would weaken the Cuban nationalist enclave. With Cubans expressing their displeasure, police escorted the Spanish workers to their quarters close to the Seidenberg factory. The day did not end without confrontations and fights that led to arrests of numerous Cubans, including Rosendo García, a well-known nationalist leader of the Partida La Tranca, whom the authorities held without charges, hoping to intimidate the Cuban community.41
As the Spanish workers took their jobs, Cuban leaders fully understood that local authorities had violated the country’s laws prohibiting foreign contract workers. The crisis commission Poyo headed set out to find a lawyer to challenge the action, but no Key West lawyer dared take the case. Poyo then contacted Martí in New York who arranged for an attorney to travel to Key West. In the meantime, when La Rosa Española resumed work with Spanish workers, the nationalist community called on Cubans to boycott Anglo Americans in every respect. Military veteran of the Ten Years War Serafín Sánchez explained, “Hacemos guerra pacífica,” meaning the Cuban community launched a boycott against all American economic establishments: “no Cuban spends a cent on any American.” “We don’t buy anything,” he said. “Cubans stay away from American shops, the butcher can’t sell meat, the American carriage driver has no customers, the black domestic does not cook, clear floors, or even wash clothes, and so it goes.”42 Cuban women took the lead in organizing the boycott, and one well-known activist and orator, Carolina “La Patriota,” took up guard at a Cuban monument at the cemetery commemorating Cuban war dead after hearing that someone had attempted to vandalize the symbol of independence. After consulting the spirits, she told the community not to worry, that “time is on our side.”43
Within a few days of the confrontations, twenty-four-year-old New York attorney Horatio Rubens arrived in Key West and the PRC crisis commission assigned Manuel P. Delgado to aid him. As a former Monroe County representative in Tallahassee and fluent in English, Delgado knew the local Anglo American politicians well and as a notary prepared the necessary legal documents for the local court. Disturbed at Rubens’s presence in Key West and noting his youth, local authorities attempted to intimidate the lawyer. During his first night in Key West, several men entered his hotel room and suggested he leave the city, but the Cuban community kept a close guard on him.44 Rubens turned his attention to the contract labor case, quickly concluding that local federal authorities, including the district attorney and district court judge, planned to ignore what was an obvious violation of federal contract labor laws. He filed a complaint with the superintendent of immigration at the U.S. Department of Treasury, who investigated and summoned the contending parties to Washington.45 Rubens represented the Cubans while the Key West delegation included the mayor, collector of customs, Seidenberg, and a few others. They met with the superintendent and the secretary of the treasury and finally on January 27 with the attorney general, who ruled that deportation warrants be prepared against the Spanish workers.46
On receiving the formal order of deportations, lawyers for the Spanish workers secured orders of habeas corpus placing the deportations in abeyance and secured further legal protection by having the Spaniards sign affidavits declaring their intentions to become U.S. citizens. The Treasury Department also ordered Patterson to arrest those responsible for bringing the workers to Key West, but a visiting district judge from New Orleans summarily dismissed the charges and turned the proceedings against the Cuban community. The Cubans, not the Anglo American citizens of Key West, were the lawbreakers, the judge told Patterson in open court. He reprimanded the district attorney for neglecting “his duty in not making charges against General [sic] Martí and others who had been raising funds here at various times for the purpose of carrying on a war with a nation with which the United States was at peace and had a treaty.” The citizens of Key West did err, he said, in not “taking steps long ago to have prevented such illegal matters.”47 According to Rubens’s account, when he objected the judge accused him of interfering in local matters and defending delinquents “who raised funds—and on this matter he was very well informed—to promote revolution in Cuba against Spain.” “You should all be in jail,” he yelled at Rubens. He immediately sent a cable to the secretary of the treasury and the attorney general, who appealed the case even as relations between Cubans and North Americans further deteriorated.48 The next day, the Immigration Bureau’s agent in Key West arrested ninety-three Spanish workers, and their attorneys requested writs of habeas corpus in two test cases. Judge Boarmann again dismissed the cases, citing the lack of evidence and prompting defense attorneys to issue writs for the rest of the laborers. Patterson immediately prepared a case for the appeals court, but workers remained at their jobs and the Cuban community felt betrayed.49
The district judge’s verbal assault on the members of the PRC highlighted the local authorities’ intention to disrupt revolutionary activities, and in this, they were somewhat successful. Threatened with arrest, Poyo and local PRC leaders temporarily ceased their fundraising activities while investigating their legal rights to conspire against Spanish rule in Cuba. Rubens assured Martí and Poyo that nothing in U.S. law prohibited the PRC’s activities, at least until they launched an assault on a friendly nation. Given the threats, Martí nevertheless urged Poyo to proceed with prudence and at his own pace, even suggesting that PRC Secretary Gualterio García take the lead initially and Poyo remain less visible.50
The conflict became even more complicated as a war of words embroiled the Equator Democrat, El Yara, José Martí’s Patria, and El Porvenir, a newspaper in New York. A personal enemy of Martí, El Porvenir’s editor, Enrique Trujillo, condemned the introduction of contract workers but also opposed revolutionary nationalism and held Martí and the local PRC responsible for the escalating tensions. Martí’s nationalist rhetoric and the PRC’s militant ethos, Trujillo argued, provoked the violent confrontations. He complained of Martí’s inflammatory article “A Cuba,” also reprinted in English in the Equator Democrat, which reassured Cubans of the justness of their cause, condemned the Anglo American community, and interpreted these events as further motivation to secure their own country.51 Trujillo condemned the politicization in the cigar establishments designed to raise funds for revolution as well as the military-like organization on the factory floors that enforced the exclusion of Spaniards. Rather than rejecting and alienating Spanish workers, Trujillo counseled Cuban workers to respect their right to work, tell them of their nationalist aspirations, and win them over.52
Cubans debated how best to respond and initially attempted to influence the political parties, but this no longer made sense in this ethnically polarized circumstance. Democratic and Republican party politicians unanimously supported the actions of the local authorities, causing many frustrated Cubans to bolt the parties altogether. On February 6, a group of Cubans formed a new political party, Partido Independiente, whose executive committee included Fernando Figueredo (president), Martín Herrera (first vice president), M. R. Moreno (second vice president), and Manuel P. Delgado (secretary). The first three were Republicans and the last a Democrat, reflecting Cuban disaffection with both parties. Now they had little leverage in the face of the apparent unity of Anglo Americans of both parties.53 Feeling a deep sense of betrayal and without leverage to influence developments, Cubans decided to abandon the city and relocate to the Tampa Bay area.
During January and February, hundreds of workers departed in search of work, but manufacturers and important Cuban community leaders joined the migration. In early March, a committee of Cubans, strongly supportive of the PRC and associated with the tobacco industry, including E. F. O’Halloran, Teodoro Pérez, Manuel Barranco, Martín Herrera, Severo de Armas, F. Fleitas, and Fernando Figueredo, visited Tampa and soon returned determined to relocate.54 In Tampa, the Cuban entrepreneurs received inducements to move their factories, including land and buildings, and a new cigar center in Ocala offered further possibilities. In addition to an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 workers, important PRC leaders followed the manufacturers, including Figueredo.55 El Yara announced, “It is resolved: the indecisiveness of the majority of Cubans about leaving to other places is now firmly resolved. The agreement by seven or eight Cuban manufacturers to transfer their factories to West Tampa is definite.” “The new Israelites,” declared El Yara, “depart to plant their tents in less ungrateful lands . . . let us take up the pilgrim’s knapsack . . . and prepare to leave.”56
The PRC experienced a difficult setback during the first half of 1894. The revolutionary community seemed on the verge of collapse after so many years of careful organizing. Threats to arrest its leaders, as well as the mass exodus of manufacturers and workers, left the PRC depleted; the number of revolutionary clubs declined and the contributions in the factories almost ceased. PRC structures in the factories, including the collection committees, disappeared or at least weakened as many manufacturers took advantage of the PRC’s lower profile to establish greater control over hiring and managing the factory floors. Equally troubling, events poisoned the careful relationships nationalists had built with local Anglo American supporters who now seemed to be dangerous enemies.
Despite the bleak situation, Poyo remained in Key West, as did Manuel P. Delgado, and many military veterans like General Serafín Sánchez and General Carlos Roloff, who viewed the city as an indispensable location for communicating with insurgent organizers in Cuba and eventually infiltrating the island. Among the major Cuban-owned manufactories only Eduardo Gato remained despite worker pleas to relocate his factory. In a petition to Gato, they denounced recent events and expressed solidarity with the manufacturer. “Mr. Gato,” the workers declared, “in search of justice we arrived at these shores . . . there is no justice [here] . . . we must go where it is offered. Let us all depart.” Though grateful for the workers’ solidarity, Gato made clear he did not intend to be driven from Key West and revealed that he had been offered economic inducements to remain, the first sign of a change of heart by local authorities.57 Poyo and Delgado still published El Yara, including the launching of an English-language version in March hoping to open a conversation between the Cuban and Anglo-American communities. “Animated and brilliant is the first issue in English,” observed Martí in Patria. “Its soul is José Dolores Poyo, and its language—precise and sharp—belongs to Manuel Delgado.”58
The road to reconciliation began in earnest when another dramatic event startled the Anglo American community and forced a new attitude. On March 20, a dispute in La Rosa Española factory over layoffs and wages led to a confrontation but this time between the newly imported Spanish workers and the factory management. When conversations broke down, workers stoned the factory, broke windows, and attempted forcibly to enter the building. A contingent of police rushed to the scene and pushed the protesters back, but not before a flying rock struck and severely injured the Spanish foreman who had overseen the importation of the workers. The disturbance outraged Seidenberg, who issued a statement declaring that this incident represented a victory for the Cubans and a humiliation for Anglo Americans. The factory opened again after three days, but in the meantime Seidenberg also made plans to relocate to Tampa.59
Key West’s Anglo American leadership realized their miscalculation. Importing Spanish strike breakers to undermine Cuban labor unions and the PRC complicated relations with the federal authorities in Washington, D.C., and sparked a wholesale exodus of Cuban workers and manufacturers. Gato’s factory, the largest remaining Cuban-owned establishment, stayed, but only because the authorities courted him and provided the kinds of inducements offered in Tampa. Anglo Americans harmed relations with their Cuban neighbors without stemming the movement of factories to the Tampa Bay area, which they learned had more to do with economic competition than labor and nationalist activism. Furthermore, they were sorely disabused of their expectation that contracting anarchist-influenced Spanish laborers in Havana uninterested in Cuban nationalism would resolve their labor–management problems. This unfortunate event and its consequences caused some, including Pendleton’s Equator Democrat, to rethink their attitude and seek reconciliation, asking Cubans to remain in Key West, where they could more effectively serve the Cuban independence movement.60 Throughout April tensions declined and both sides worked to bring the conflicts and animosities to an end. In February 1895, Cubans finally launched their uprising against Spain and though federal authorities in Key West remained vigilant, most local Anglo American politicians rallied behind the Cuban cause.
Cubans in Key West participated politically as U.S. ethnic subjects but always with a transnational perspective that advanced Cuban independence. Cordial relations between Cubans and Anglo Americans usually prevailed, but whenever events derailed the political quid pro quo and threatened the nationalist cause, relations quickly deteriorated into disagreement, distrust, and angry ethnic strife. During 1880–95, political pressures external to Key West as well as local Anglo American perceptions that nationalist activism affected the city’s prosperity threatened the local political understandings created in the 1870s. The U.S. government’s desire to advance a reciprocal trade agreement with Spain first provoked tensions between Cubans and local authorities during 1883 and 1884. Although local federal officials took legal action against leading Cuban nationalists for launching expeditions and accumulating weapons, they did so with little enthusiasm, leading to the acquittal of most. However, when Anglo Americans perceived their local economic interests to be in jeopardy during 1888 and 1889, they took firm action against offending Cubans, including imprisonment, deportations, and threats of lynching. Anglo Americans blamed disruptive Cubans for the departure of cigar factories to Tampa and other locales and determined to control them more effectively. Cubans did not bend to intimidation and continued defending their nationalist activism through local participation as ethnic subjects. José Martí’s arrival in Key West injected even more nationalist enthusiasm, which Anglo Americans viewed as a further assault on their economic integrity. In 1894, this resulted in direct and even violent ethnic confrontations between Cubans and Anglo Americans that dissipated only when Key West authorities recognized that the mass exodus of Cubans from Key West represented a greater threat to their interests than refusing to continue satisfying the demands of important non-Cuban cigar manufacturers.
After a tenuous reconciliation, Cubans returned to their nationalist work and Anglo Americans reassured them of their sympathy for Cuban independence, especially after the outbreak of the second war of independence in early 1895. The two groups dealt with each other carefully and avoided direct confrontations. Expeditionary organizing resumed in direct violation of neutrality laws, again complicating U.S. relations with Spain, and while federal authorities guarded the coasts and intercepted numerous expeditions, Anglo Americans in Key West turned a blind eye when they could. After Spain’s defeat most Cuban political leaders returned to Cuba, transforming politics in Key West. Exile politics disappeared and Cuban involvement in politics reflected more clearly ethnic interests focused on defending local economic and social concerns rather than nationalist ideals and transnational experiences.
1 For background on the Cuban nationalist communities in the United States during the nineteenth century see Gerald E. Poyo, “With All, and For the Good of All”: The Emergence of Popular Nationalism in the Cuban Communities of the United States, 1848–1898 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989).
2 Gerald E. Poyo, “Cuban Revolutionaries and Monroe County Reconstruction Politics, 1868–1876,” Florida Historical Quarterly (April 1977): 407–18.
3 Consuelo E. Stebbins, City of Intrigue, Nest of Revolution. A Documentary History of Key West in the Nineteenth Century (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007), 167–71.
4 Jefferson B. Browne, Key West. The Old and the New (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1973), 69; Poyo, “Cuban Revolutionaries,” 419.
5 Semi-Weekly Floridian (Tallahassee), September 17, October 8, 12, 15, November 23, 1880; February 7, 1882, University of Florida Libraries (UFL).
6 Weekly Floridian (Tallahassee), November 21, 1882; January 23, April 12, 1883, UFL.
7 Key of the Gulf (Key West), July 1, 1876, UFL.
8 Weekly Floridian (Tallahassee), August 15, 1876, UFL.
9 Weekly Floridian (Tallahassee), November 24, 1874, UFL.
10 Browne, Key West, 120–21.
11 Tom Terrill, The Tariff, Politics, and American Foreign Policy, 1874–1901 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973), 72, 85.
12 Mr. Frelinghuysen to Mr. Reed, April 30, 1884, in House Executive Documents, 2nd Session, 48th Congress, 1884–1885, I, document 359, in Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the U.S. Transmitted to Congress, With the Annual Message of the President, December 1, 1884. (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1885).
13 Weekly Floridian (Tallahassee), February 12, 1884, UFL.
14 Weekly Floridian (Tallahassee), February 26, 1884, UFL.
15 La Voz de Hatuey (Key West), March 1, 1884, H 1868, 1885–1896, Archivo del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores. Madrid (AMAE).
16 El Yara (Key West), February 23, 1884, Correspondence from Enrique Dupuy de Lome to US Secretary of State, March 17, 1884, Notes from the Spanish Legation in the US to the Department of State, 1790–1906, National Archives and Records Administration.
17 Weekly Floridian (Tallahassee), April 22, 29, 1884, UFL; Browne, Key West, 120; U.S. Congress, Senate Journal, 48th Congress, 1st Sess., 272; House Journal, 48th Cong., 1st Sess., 531, 635; House Executive Documents, 48th Cong., 2nd Sess., I, 493–95, 502–21.
18 United States vs. Emilio Diaz, case no. 213 (pages 1–8); United States vs. Bruno Alfonso, case no. 214 (pages 9–14); United States vs. Clinton Shavers, case no. 221 (pages 25–35); United States vs. Carlos Aguero, case no. 222 (37–40) in Criminal Final Record, July 1884–May 1906; United States vs. José D. Poyo, July 5, 1884, Violation of Neutrality Law in General, Minutes, February 1883–April 1888. U.S. District Court. Southern District of Florida, Record Group 21. National Archives and Records Administration, SE Division, Atlanta, Georgia (NARA, SE)
19 United States vs. Federico Gil Marrero, case no. 220 (pages 18–24), July 1884 in Criminal, Final Record, July 1884–May 1906. NARA, SE.
20 Stebbins, City of Intrigue, 138–39.
21 United States vs. Emilio Diaz, case no. 213 (pages 1–8); United States vs. Bruno Alfonso, case no. 214 (pages 9–14); United States vs. Clinton Shavers, case no. 221 (pages 25–35); United States vs. Carlos Aguero, case no. 222 (37–40) in Criminal Final Record, July 1884–May 1906; United States vs. José D. Poyo, July 5, 1884, Violation of Neutrality Law in General, Minutes, February 1883–April 1888. NARA, SE Division.
22 United States vs. Federico Gil Marrero, case no. 220 (pages 18–24), July 1884 in Criminal, Final Record, July 1884–May 1906. NARA, SE Division.
23 Stebbins, City of Intrigue, 138–39.
24 Weekly Floridian (Tallahassee), October 28, December 9, 1884, UFL.
25 Weekly Floridian (Tallahassee), January 27, February 3, 1885, UFL.
26 Weekly Floridian (Tallahassee), December 9, 16, 1884; January 13, February 3, 1885, UFL.
27 Joaquin M. Torroja, Consul, Cayo Hueso to Excmo. Señor Ministro de Estado, Madrid, August 22, September 14, 1887, AMAE; “Manifiesto,” Las Novedades, November 8, 1888, “Hispanic American Newspapers, 1808–1980,” Readex Digital Collections, Newsbank (RDC).
28 For background on the problem of banditry in Cuba during the 1880s, see Rosalie Schwartz, Lawless Liberators: Political Banditry and Cuban Independence (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989).
29 El Bandolerismo en Cuba, 3 vols. (Havana: Establecimiento Tipográfico, 1890), I, 117–23.
30 Joaquin M. Torroja, Consul, Cayo Hueso to Excmo. Señor Ministro de Estado, Madrid, February 8, 11, 1887, AMAE.
31 The Daily Equator Democrat (Key West), May 31, 1888, AMAE.
32 The Daily Equator Democrat (Key West), June 8, 1888, AMAE.
33 The Daily Equator Democrat (Key West), May 31, 1888, AMAE.
34 The Daily Equator Democrat (Key West), June 12, 1888, AMAE.
35 El Productor (Havana), November 3, 1889, Biblioteca Nacional José Martí (BNJM)
36 El Yara (Key West), October 29, 1889, Legajo 721, Caja 54/7986, Fondo 26.1, Grupo de Fondo 10, Archivo General de Administración. Alcala de Henares (AGA).
37 El Español (Havana), November 26, 1889,” in “Recortes de Periódicos, 23 Noviembre al 1 de Diciembre de 1889,” Legajo 260, no.4, Asuntos Politicos, Archivo Nacional de Cuba (ANC).
38 Weekly Floridian (Tallahassee), January 1, 1889, UFL; La Propaganda (Key West), November 12, 1888, AMAE.
39 Tobacco Leaf (New York), July 20, 27, August 3, 1892.
40 Gerardo Castellanos y Garcia, Motivos de Cayo Hueso (UCAR, García y Cia., 1935), 287–91.
41 Ibid., 290–91.
42 Serafín Sánchez a Gerardo Castellanos, January 17, 1894, in Castellanos, Motivos de Cayo Hueso, 293–94.
43 Castellanos, Motivos de Cayo Hueso, 293–94.
44 Horatio S. Rubens (trans. Adolfo G. Castellanos), Libertad. Cuba y su apostol (Havana: La Rosa Blanca, 1956), 2–10.
45 Rubens, Libertad, 31–36; Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, N.C.), January 10, 1894; The State (Columbia, S.C.), January 12, 1894, “Early American Newspapers, 1690–1922,” RDC.
46 Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, N.C.), January 21, 1894; Savannah Tribune (Savannah, Ga.), January 27, 1894; The State (Columbia, S.C.), January 29, 1894, “Early American Newspapers, 1690–1922,” RDC.
47 Columbus Daily Enquirer (Columbus, Ga.), February 10, 1894, “Early American Newspapers, 1690–1922,” RDC.
48 Rubens, Libertad, 33–35.
49 Columbus Daily Enquirer (Columbus, Ga.), February 11, 1894, “Early American Newspapers, 1690–1922,” RDC.
50 José Martí to Presidente del Cuerpo de Consejo de Cayo Hueso, April 4, 1894; to Gualterio García, April 3, 1894, Luis García Pascual and Enrique Moreno Pla, eds. José Martí. Epistolario. 5 vols. (Havana: Editorial Ciencias Sociales, 1993), IV, 96, 101–2.
51 Patria (New York), January 27, 1894.
52 El Porvenir (New York), January 24, 1894, BNJM.
53 El Porvenir (New York), February 14, 21, 1894, BNJM; José Martí to Antonio Maceo, February 1, 1894, García Pascual, ed., José Marti. Epistolario, IV: 37–38; Castellanos, Motivos de Cayo Hueso, 301.
54 El Porvenir (New York), March 14, 1894, BNJM; Tobacco Leaf (New York), March 14, 1894.
55 José Martí to Ramón Rivera, [April] 1894, García Pascual, ed., José Martí. Epistolario, IV: 125.
56 Patria (New York), April 5, 1894.
57 Patria (New York), March 16, 1894.
58 Ibid.
59 The Sun (Baltimore), March 24, 1894; “Early American Newspapers, 1690–1922,” RDC; Tobacco Leaf (New York), March 28, April 4, 1894.
60 Patria (New York), April 5, 1894.