3

Black Cubans in the United States

The Havana of Martí’s boyhood offered scant opportunity to interact with members of the black population on a basis of equality, and his experience in the Cuban countryside was the one childhood setting where he vividly recorded his contact with slaves. His suffering in prison and at the San Lázaro quarries as an adolescent put him in the proximity of men like Juan de Dios, an ancient black man with the fire of Africa in his eyes, and Tomás, an eleven-year-old bozal (newly arrived slave), both of whom he described in the political tract El presidio político en Cuba (Political Prison in Cuba), published in Spain in 1871. Residence in Havana in 1879 placed him in frequent communication with the well-educated Afro-Cuban Juan Gualberto Gómez, a co-conspirator in the independence cause, and offered contact with other Cubans of African heritage. It remained for the years of living in the United States, however, to provide sustained connections with Cubans of color. In New York he worked closely with black and mulatto members of the exile community and in Tampa boarded in the home of a black couple, Ruperto and Paulina Pedroso.

New York

When Martí delivered a formal address at Steck Hall in January 1880, his message reached an audience of Cubans that included compatriots of modest means and numerous people of color. For many of those in attendance, the orator was an unfamiliar face, but as his words flowed from the written page, the crowd grew increasingly enthusiastic. He spoke of the past war, of Cuban aspirations, and of the challenges ahead. He applied lessons of history. If Americans unjustly criticized Spanish American countries for not having achieved what the United States had achieved, one simply needed to note that the circumstances of their founding had been profoundly different. The Puritans came with the plow, and the Spaniards came with the lance, explained Martí, using distinctive images, plow versus lance (farmer versus soldier), to reinforce his contrast. Deftly uniting all Cubans in common resentment of the disdain they suffered in the Anglo-Saxon United States, Martí’s message made everyone in the audience feel a little bit like the blacks and mulattoes among his listeners (EC 6: 156).1

The Steck Hall speech laid out ideas about race that would be the underpinning for Martí’s sociopolitical planning over the next fourteen and a half years and that he espoused more than a decade later in Patria (EC 6: 157–58). He argued against Spain’s promises of a gradual abolition, deplored the mother country’s charade of progress, and explained why black Cubans could not trust the colonial ruses. In figurative terms, he cast liberty for Cuba and liberty for the enslaved in the same context: the insurrectionist cause. With subtle but persuasive language he reasoned that the bitterness caused by deep wounds would not easily disappear, but that it would be a grave offense to suppose that most Cuban men of color were harboring toward whites an ill will that they could not contain. He declared that these black Cubans were “as sensible to all that is noble and as capable in the intellectual realm as we are” (EC 6: 157).

To fully understand Martí’s writing about race is to understand that he wrote with the creative force of a literary master and was able to synthesize complex concepts with symbolism. His statement, “We must pay with our suffering for the criminal wealth of our grandfathers,” called upon all Cubans, not just slave-owners, to atone for having built the wealth of the colony on the backs of Africans (EC 6: 139). His declaration that any faults of a slave fell wholly and exclusively on the owner put the blame for any shortcomings in the Afro-Cuban population squarely on the architects of the Spanish colonial past (EC 6: 156). His lines about the slavery endured by indigenous populations in Mexico as recorded in La Revista Universal in 1875 confirm the consistency of his thinking in regard to victims of abuse; the burden and blame do not adhere to the abused but to the abuser: “Having a slave tarnishes the owner: it is shameful to own someone else” (6: 266).

FIGURE 3. Rafael Serra, 1896. By permission of Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations (1252500).

In the years he lived in New York, Martí befriended, worked with, and earned the admiration of many Cubans and Puerto Ricans of color. Some contacts were through his revolutionary efforts and some through his many cultural alliances, but a primary engagement was through education. By his educational endeavors Martí showed that he was not reluctant to work with and in racially identified groups. Juan Gualberto Gómez, with whom Martí had conspired in Cuba in 1878, and Martín Morúa Delgado were two Afro-Cuban leaders who disagreed about how people of African heritage should be designated racially and how they should align themselves with associations. Gómez grouped blacks and mulattoes together as belonging to the raza de color (people of color), while Morúa Delgado, whose mother was African and father was Basque, insisted that backs and mulattoes were distinct racial categories (Helg, Our Rightful Share, 38–41). Bound up in such differences was the question of whether those of color, either black or mulatto, should belong to separate groups and also whether any such race-based organizations had the potential to trigger a negative reaction among whites. Morúa Delgado opposed racially identified associations, saying that Cubanness should define all, while Gómez defended such groups.

Gómez’s point of view was seen sympathetically by Afro-Cubans in the United States like Rafael Serra, who joined forces with Martí to promote education for people of color through La Liga (also called La Liga de Instrucción), founded in New York in 1890. Essentially an organization or society that became known as an educational circle with regularly scheduled classes for working-class Afro-Caribbeans, La Liga opened its doors on January 22 at 178 Bleeker Street (Helg, Our Rightful Share, 41–42). Martí’s collaboration with Rafael Serra to found La Liga was an important commitment on his part. Classes at La Liga were scheduled throughout the week. Tuesdays and Thursdays were set for primary instruction, Wednesdays were for a literary topic, and Fridays twice a month were dedicated to a special lecture. Martí taught at La Liga, as well as helping to find teachers and promoting membership, and rushed to his Thursday evening sessions after his work as a Spanish instructor at Central High School on East Sixty-Fourth Street. He took his daughter María with him to La Liga on Monday nights.

Patria

Another primary way in which Martí interacted with Cubans and Puerto Ricans of color was through Patria, whose first issue appeared in March 1892. The newspaper became a vehicle for writing about race and making connections with Cuba, as planning proceeded for a new revolutionary struggle against Spain, and Patria, which allowed Martí to discuss ideas and tackle issues he also addressed in his speeches, contains some of his most famous and familiar statements about race, like the essay “Mi raza.” It also gave him a chance to feature images of prominent Afro-Cuban figures like Antonio Maceo and Maceo’s mother. Whether Patria should be considered an exile press, one that takes advantage of a foreign location to deliver messages to the home country, or an immigrant/ethnic press, one focused on immigrants, is a question that is often raised.2 Martí worked extensively with immigrants, but his purpose was to change the political situation in Cuba, so the exile claim seems stronger.

The 1890s were years of stress and tension for Martí, involving a whirlwind pace of travel, planning, and activities. He had founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party to coordinate the patriotic groups seeking an end to Spanish rule in Cuba, and in 1892 he was elected as its delegate (Delegado), that is to say, chief spokesman. He was anxious about Secretary of State James G. Blaine’s designs on Spanish America, especially Cuba. The Spanish government, meanwhile, protested his activities and had him followed by Pinkerton’s detective service. His wife and son visited in the summer of 1891 but abruptly departed, assisted by the Spanish consul in New York. He was battling those who still sought annexation to the United States, while also teaching and keeping up his extensive correspondence. During these difficult times, Martí channeled energy into Patria, where he forcefully countered personal sniping directed at him and heated attacks against the egalitarian republic that the Cuban Revolutionary Party promised. Sotero Figueroa, the Afro–Puerto Rican editor and printer of La Revista Ilustrada (The Illustrated Magazine) and Martí’s colleague at La Liga, was the printer and managing editor for Patria and contributed articles to the newspaper. Thus Patria served not only as a means to chart a positive path for Cuban race relations but also as a direct personal connection with a prominent Afro-Antillean. It was filled with articles dealing with race, some of which were discussed in chapter 2.

Patria’s very first edition put “The Bases of the Cuban Revolutionary Party”—bases that insisted on a unified effort to achieve Cuban independence—on the front page and then repeated them in all but a handful of subsequent issues. The bases also pledged to help Puerto Rico gain its freedom and sought the foundation of a new nation capable of overcoming the “dangers of sudden liberty in a society created on the basis of slavery” (1: 279). Martí led with a piece called “Our Ideas,” in which he linked Cuba and Puerto Rico in the quest for liberty and declared the need for and the purposes of the war against Spain. He intimated with careful wording that while the planned revolution would embrace all without regard to color, the social equality envisioned would not mean wishing for or imposing a forced social mingling among races. At the same time, he insisted that social equality between those of equal standing, regardless of color, was foundational and had its basis in the “visible equity of nature” (1: 320–21). Another article, a year later, revealed how Martí paired freedom for all with freedom for slaves. In describing the 1873 abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico, Martí stated that Cubans had pronounced slaves to be free in 1869, implying that both islands had already resolved the slavery question. But in the article’s conclusion he declared that Puerto Rico, with abolition of slavery but no political emancipation, still was home to many de facto slaves both black and white (emphasis mine) (5: 329).

Patria gave Martí a forum for spirited debate and a chance to answer critics. Reacting to patronizing comments from an annexationist in Havana who had disparaged the war effort and was quoted in the U.S. press, Martí took the opportunity to defend black Cubans. The critic had labeled Martí a fine poet and orator but “wildly visionary” and out of touch with life in Cuba. In a backhanded compliment he added that Martí was noble to dedicate himself to the culture and advancement of black Cubans. Marti’s skillful response in Patria fully addressed these racial insinuations, characterizing the man of color in Cuba as a person who could reason and read perfectly well for himself “without needing for cultured manna to fall from a white heaven.” Martí further reasoned that there was no need to specify social uplifting solely for the black population in Cuba since proportionately as many whites as blacks might need such elevation (2: 108–9). The positive portrayal continued with a description of the Cuban freedman living in the eastern part of the island. It was a story of progress: a hard-working soul who formerly held only the small plot allotted for slaves to cultivate was now master of his own farm land. He had a good horse, spruced-up clothing, and a rural school paid for through the persistence of the black community (2: 109).3 Martí’s Patria account coincides with historical assessments of the same era. As Herbert S. Klein and Ben Vinson note, the Ten Years’ War brought the virtual demise of plantation slavery in the eastern part of the island, with no attempt by the Spanish government to reenslave those emancipated. As a result the region became “a center of a vibrant free colored peasant agriculture that would define the Oriente (Cuba’s Eastern region) to the 20th century” (92).

Throughout the articles in Patria, Martí wove and interwove themes of unity: Cubans and Puerto Ricans, blacks and whites, peasant farmers (guajiros) and freedmen (libertos), slaves seeking freedom from a master and colonies seeking freedom from a ruler—all were joined in aspiring for a just future. Martí also projected an idealistic scenario. Whites were forgiven and blacks forgiving in the common struggle; guajiros and libertos would share the same countryside. Men of Spain were not the enemy. He declared in the famous essay “My Race” in Patria that to speak of race was to be redundant, that there would be no race war in Cuba, and that to be Cuban meant more than white, more than mulatto, more than black (2: 298–99).

Florida

In the 1890s, as fervor was growing for a new push for independence among the Cuban clubs in Florida, Néstor Carbonell, president of the Ignacio Agramonte Club in Tampa, asked that Martí be invited to speak at a fund-raising event.4 The delegate arrived on November 25, 1891, and the following day gave an impassioned speech, “With all and for the good of all,” at the Liceo Cubano. On November 27 the triumph was repeated with “The New Pines” address and engendered such enthusiasm that a Liga de instrucción, like La Liga in New York, was formed. The Liga in Tampa began in the home of a well-regarded Afro-Cuban patriot, Cornelio Brito, and would count thirty members by the time Martí returned to New York. As Nancy Mirabal remarks about the Tampa association: “While on the one hand, Martí believed that ‘everything that divides men, everything that separates or herds men together in categories is a sin against humanity,’ on the other hand he assisted and supported Afro-Cuban clubs like La Liga” (58). Among the Cuban clubs, first in Tampa and later in Key West, Martí’s presence was electrifying. His soaring speeches delivered to the Cuban émigré community in Florida won affection and admiration from listeners of all races and were powerful fund-raising devices.

The compatriots Martí met in Florida were part of a mixed-race community that was distinctive in the American South. In the late nineteenth century, the time that Martí was visiting Florida, whites, blacks, and mulattoes all worked in a common space on the cigar factory floors. As Susan Greenbaum’s book More than Black: Afro-Cubans in Tampa notes, since cigar-making required specialized skills and its workers were organized, the Afro-Cubans working in cigar factories were better off financially than Southern blacks and had virtually no association with American blacks (12). The Afro-Cubans self-identified primarily as Cubans, and thus defined themselves by nationality rather than by race, just as José Martí hoped. However, even as the ambience for Cuban blacks seemed promising, the racial climate in the United States was moving toward the imposition of a different reality. As Greenbaum explains, black Cubans working in the South after Reconstruction faced the encroachment of Jim Crow laws and segregation that saw them primarily as blacks (57). In 1896, a year after Martí’s death, the Plessy v. Ferguson case that was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the doctrine of separate but equal facilities for blacks and whites in the United States.5

In Florida the exile discovered a tradition from the home country, the lector. Cuban cigar factory workers were accustomed to having a lector (reader) read aloud to them from books and newspapers as they wrapped tobacco leaves.⁶ Although Martí was unaware of the lector role before coming to Tampa, he quickly became attuned to the importance of reaching this audience of listeners. When he wrote to José Dolores Poyo about preparations to visit Key West, Martí crafted his letter keeping in mind how it would sound to the cigar workers (Tinajero 74–78). As Tinajero notes, “the work of the lectores was indispensable in the efforts to have Martí’s message reach the cigar workers of Key West” (78).

Once in Key West himself, Martí spoke to factory workers as well as to gatherings in clubs and private homes, and as he had done in Tampa, he tailored his message to those in his audience. When Martí spoke at the Eduardo H. Gato factory in Key West on January 3, 1892, he addressed workers from the lector’s platform and began to speak after receiving a welcome of tapping chavetas at the workstations. Chavetas were a main utensil of the cigar roller, a knife used to cut the tobacco leaf and also shape the cigar. The orator skillfully connected the workers’ primary tool to his primary goal: “The Republic is the people with the worker’s chaveta in its right hand and the rifle of freedom in its left” (Tinajero 81).⁷

Martí’s appreciation of the lectores was also tied to his belief in the importance of education, and he shared ideas about what should be read in the cigar factories. In writing to José Dolores Poyo, who had been a lector himself as well as a newspaper publisher, Martí suggested: “dramatic readings, lively depictions of Cuban traditions, selected passages from works by local writers, readings of poetry written in Cuba [and] stimulating accounts about Cuban poets” (Tinajero 83).

Personal Contacts

Martí’s personal contacts with black and mulatto Cubans in the United States are a tangible testimony to his feelings about race and to the way people of color regarded him. During the time that Martí taught at La Liga, he took María Mantilla (later María Mantilla de Romero) with him on Monday nights, visits she described in a brief piece published in Cuba in 1950. Martí wanted his daughter to be a good pianist and asked her to join him at La Liga so that she could play music for the assembly and give pleasure to those who had scant pleasure in their lives. She recalls Cuban leaders at La Liga, men of color, as educated and gentlemanly: “Among the Cubans at La Liga I remember above all Rafael Serra, Sotero Figueroa and the Bonilla brothers. These last ones were cigar makers and were men of great stature, more than six feet tall. The idolatry of these men for Martí was truly admirable” (389–90).

An example of the devotion that Martí inspired in Afro-Cubans in Florida can be found in his relationship with Ruperto and Paulina Pedroso, a black couple of relatively modest means, whom he first met in Key West in 1891. After the Pedrosos moved to Ybor City (Tampa), their boardinghouse became a safe haven for Martí when he was in town, and the couple guarded him zealously after there were threats to his life, including an attempt to poison him. Horatio Rubens, the American lawyer who assisted Martí in legal work for the Cubans of Key West and Tampa, wrote of Martí’s positive regard for and influence on the couple and described Paulina as a woman “who literally worshipped Martí” (32). Rubens also described the kind of educational vision that Martí imparted to Cubans of every race and station, including Paulina: “I remember once that we were given a superb omelet,—an omelet with green peas, surpassingly made by Paulina…. While she made ready, I glanced about the little room and, to my astonishment, discovered a number of books, all in English. I picked up one volume, showing it to Martí. Smiling gently he said, Ask her.’ The book was Paulina’s, it was Bryce’s American Commonwealth, and she was reading it little by little to prepare for effective governance in a free Cuba” (32–33). And as Greenbaum notes: “Martí’s practice of strolling along Seventh Avenue with Paulina on his arm has been mentioned frequently, interpreted as a deliberate gesture of solidarity with Afro-Cubans, a sign of respect and intimacy that he hoped other Cubans would emulate” (77). Martí wrote two letters to Paulina that we know of and made reference to her in his correspondence with María Mantilla. The tone in these missives was always affectionate and respectful.8

FIGURE 4. Paulina Pedroso, circa 1890. Tony Pizzo Collection. By permission of University of South Florida Special Collections.

Comments by whites close to Martí, by his daughter María, and by lawyer and friend Horatio Rubens, who are quoted in the paragraphs above, may seem excessive, even patronizing by today’s standards, yet they are entirely consistent with the way José Martí was received and appreciated by countless individuals, both black and white. Paulina Pedroso’s own words confirm this assessment. On the second anniversary of his death, she offered an effusive tribute to Martí that was published in the Tampa newspaper Cuba. It read: “Marti! I loved you as a mother, I revere you as a Cuban, I idolize you as precursor of our liberty, I cry for you as martyr of our country. All [of us], black and white, rich or poor, educated or ignorant pay homage to you with our love. You were good: Cuba will owe her independence to you.”9

Antislavery Writing

In the United States Martí was acquainted with two authors of Cuban antislavery novels, although their work did not impact his writing. He never mentioned Sofía, by Martín Morúa Delgado, a mulatto whose mother had been a slave, and referred to Cecilia Valdés, by white exile Cirilo Villaverde, only briefly. There is no mention of Morúa Delgado’s 1892 critique of Villaverde’s work (Williams 160). The seeming distance from Sofía can be explained by two factors. First, Morúa Delgado’s work was published in 1891 in Havana, and there is no evidence that Martí was ever aware of the work. Second, Martí’s main contact with Morúa Delgado, who was a labor leader and editor of El Pueblo, a Key West paper, was to complain about a letter published in El Pueblo that had misrepresented a meeting held by the patriots in New York (1: 206–7). The connection with Villaverde is shaded by Villaverde’s early ties to Narciso López, the filibusterer whom Martí denounced with scorn, and by the Cecilia Valdés author’s annexationist history. In his early years in New York, Villaverde was a supporter of Cuba’s break from Spain but not of independence. Furthermore, he initially favored annexation to the United States and was no champion of abolition. As Doris Sommer relates: “It took the U.S. Civil War to produce Villaverde’s about-face on the importance of slavery. He turned completely around, concluding that immediate freedom for slaves was the first and most important step to Cuba’s liberation” (200).

Aside from two almost ephemeral entries in the notes, there is just one written reference to Villaverde: a two-page obituary in Patria, in 1894. Martí, aiming to establish common cause, burnished the compatriot’s support of independence, in an article that is cordial but not effusive. In the one reference to Narciso López, Martí says that at the time of the (1848) Lópezled uprising in Cuba, Villaverde deserved credit for not fearing death in the hour of trial.10 The Patria writer noted briefly aspects of literary style, the author’s life in exile, and his “sad and delightful” Cecilia Valdés. Martí reserved highest praise for Villaverde as a man in his seventies, having lent his voice vigorously to the cause of independence. It is not clear that Martí ever read Villaverde’s novel or had more than cursory knowledge of its contents, because nowhere in this brief article does he use the words negro, slave, or slavery. Cecilia Valdés is an epic novel about race relations in colonial Cuba. Its pages are filled with urban slaves, slave-owners, freed blacks, cimarrones (runaway slaves), incestuous romance born of master/slave sex, scenes of depredation and abuse at the plantation, and plans for and fear of a slave uprising. None of this was evident in the brief tribute in Patria. Instead, Martí emphasized the author’s beautiful written Spanish and the fact that Anselmo Suárez y Romero, author of the antislavery text Francisco, owned a copy of the first volume of Cecilia Valdés, published in 1838 (5: 242).

Antonio Zambrana, author of El negro Francisco (The Negro Francisco), published in 1875, shone in Martí’s writing for his patriotic role but was featured in Patria only once in connection with slavery and with no reference to his novel.¹¹ The other antislavery writers of Cuba are but a glimmer in the obra martiana. Freed slave Juan Francisco Manzano, who wrote his autobiography in 1839, appeared only once; Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda merited several mentions but none in relation to her novel Sab, published in Madrid in 1841. Significantly, the only two antislavery works that Martí actually discussed in terms of slavery belong to North American authors: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, both of which are described in chapter 5 on U.S. abolitionism.

“With All and for the Good of All”

New York and Florida presented different Cuban communities. The cigar industry was thriving in the New York City area as well as Florida during Martí’s years, and it was a source for workers responsive to the Partido Revolucionario Cubano’s message. However, many of the New York compatriots were white and middle class, and one of their prominent figures was Enrique Trujillo, editor of El Porvenir (The Future), a newspaper founded in 1890, that enjoyed high circulation among the exiles. Because Trujillo had made racist appeals to support his independence views, his perspectives were often at odds with Martí’s and with the populist fervor of working-class Cubans in Key West and Tampa. Such were the challenges Martí faced in working with diverse Cuban communities in the United States.12

Martí’s aim in forging a political arm, the Cuban Revolutionary Party, founding Patria, and delivering speeches that raised spirits and mobilized funding efforts was to bring together the diverse interests of Cubans in the United States and link them to the military leaders ready to launch a new insurrection—no small ambition. To reach each constituency in a way that was effective, he tried to act diplomatically and strategically. Even if Martí did not speak about the future for black Cubans as forcefully as Serra and other black nationalists, their esteem and support for him was without question. The fact that he achieved the creation of a unified front for a new Cuban war of liberty in 1895, with blacks and whites joined in a common struggle, is a tribute to his mission.¹³

In an impassioned talk in 1892, Rafael Serra championed Martí as the eloquent voice that had guided Cuban efforts and as the one whose generous words united all (“Martí” 274). And after Martí’s death, Serra, Sotero Figueroa, and Juan Bonilla all defended the Patria editor’s antiracist legacy and sought to counter misrepresentations about his record in race relations. Serra’s New York paper, La Doctrina de Martí, whose first issue came out July 26, 1896, began with a statement of purpose, “Nuestra labor,” that credited Martí as a source of inspiration: “We are from the school of Martí. That’s where our soul was tempered and our character was formed.” He continued echoing Martí’s call for Cubanidad: “The illustrious Martí taught us that a people composed of diverse living elements and bound together under the same yoke should be sincerely united and represented on equal terms in all the capacities that contribute to the creation of the Nation” (1). The heading under the title of Serra’s paper, “La República con Todos y para Todos” (The Republic with all and for all), underscored the connection with Martí’s famous talk in Tampa.

Black Cubans in the United States, whether in New York or in Florida, were swayed by José Martí’s words and by his example as he lived and worked among them. They saw in the Patria essayist, the La Liga instructor, and the brilliant orator who proclaimed, “With all and for the good of all” a man who treated them with warmth and dignity, shared their aspirations, and embodied the unifying concept that made them partners in Cuba’s future.