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  • City of Intrigue, Nest of Revolution: A Documentary History of Key West in the Nineteenth Century
  • Lance Ingwersen
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. 258 pp.

Most scholarly attempts to understand Key West in the nineteenth century fit into one of two categories. The first treats the development of Key West predominantly in isolation, focusing on the development of industries—in wrecking, [End Page 205] fishing, and later cigars—and infrastructure that set the foundations for the city's internal development into the twentieth century.1 The second focuses on Key West from a more international perspective by examining the city's role as an émigré colony for Cubans seeking independence from Spanish rule.2 Stebbins's study contributes significantly by bridging these two categories of scholarship, for her study suggests—it is puzzling why she does not make this connection more explicit—that Key West's economic and social development is best understood in a broader Caribbean context. The Caribbean Sea acted as a network for exchanges of all kinds, both legal and illegal, among the city, the mainland United States, and other islands, especially Cuba.

Basing her work primarily on personal translations of confidential reports, correspondence, and telegrams among Spanish consuls in Key West; the Spanish minister in Madrid; the governor-general of Cuba; the Spanish ambassador in Washington, D.C.; and local U.S. officials in Key West (all culled from the Archivo General del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores in Madrid), Stebbins traces a complex web of international interactions between 1842 and 1898. These sources provide the reader an intimate look at Key West's development and the growth of the émigré colony through an unusual prism: the perceptions of Spanish officials working there. In this way, Stebbins refocuses attention from the domestic (read, U.S.) influence of Key West's development to its impact on relations with the Spanish Empire. The documents reveal how laws passed in the United States enraged Spanish officials by reducing revenues for the Spanish Crown and how perceived inaction or unresponsiveness of U.S. customs officials and judges angered Spanish authorities while making Spanish consuls feel powerless. To the contrary, the sources reveal how attuned Spanish officials were—through the infiltration of insurgent groups—to plans intended to aid the overthrow of the Spanish Empire and to the inner workings of the Cuban émigré colony.

Stebbins divides the present study thematically more so than chronologically, beginning her examination with the salvage industry, which provided a significant source of income for the city during the first half of the nineteenth century. Closely related to Key West's development as a prosperous wrecking and salvage center—and treated in Stebbins's study in a subsequent chapter—was its growth as a port city. The city's unique position in the Caribbean on the outer, southwestern edge of the Straits of Florida made it a center for brief stopovers for ships transporting goods between U.S. ports or to foreign ports in Cuba, Central America, and the Caribbean. The establishment of customhouses in the port that taxed goods arriving in and leaving the port generated notable revenues for the city as well.

In addition to legal shipments of goods, Key West gained notoriety for two other industries: contraband and cigar manufacturing. These two industries, [End Page 206] which grew markedly in the second half of the century, combined with other forces—namely growing anti-Spanish sentiments, the eruption of the Ten Years' War, and later the Guerra Chiquita—in providing an impetus for establishing Key West as a base of support for Cuban independence. The geography of the Keys, with numerous islands and inlets, made preventing goods smuggling nearly impossible. And although this decreased revenues to both the U.S. government and the Spanish Crown, it provided an avenue for supporters of Cuban independence to ship weapons and troops to Cuba. The growth of the cigar industry, in contrast, provided economic prosperity and an explosion in numbers of the émigré community, a population boom to which the uncertainty caused by the early wars...

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