On the Betrayal of Nations: Jose Alvarez de Toledo's Philadelphia Manifesto (1811) and Justification (1816)

José Alvarez de Toledo: Soldier, Politician, Exile, Writer, Traitor

If evaluated only with regard to the duration of his presence in new American nation-building projects, writer José Alvarez de Toledo (1779 - 1858) appears, at best, as the Founding Father Who Wasn't. Unlike the better-known Félix Varela and José Martí, whose exiles in the United States supported the consolidation of their visions of Cuban nationhood, Alvarez de Toledo double-crossed the Americas, his journeys through the United States followed by a permanent return to Spain.

Two texts heavily influence the way scholars have treated Alvarez de Toledo's period of exile in the United States. In 1811 , Alvarez de Toledo used his Philadelphian Manifesto or Satisfaction in a Point of Honor (Manifiesto ó satisfaccion pundorosa), a Spanish-language memoir, to describe the circumstances of his arrival in the city. In retrospect, we can say that the Manifesto marked the beginning of his intense involvement with transnational, Spanish American independence campaigns. Five years later he used another Philadelphian document, the 1816 Justification of D. José Alvarez de Toledo (Justificación de D. José Alvarez de Toledo), to comment on his disillusionment and garner a pardon from Spain, to which he immediately returned. The exile's insistence on his personal virtue in each document sets readers up to be wary when they realize how thoroughly the 1816 Justification overturns the vision of the Americas crafted in the 1811 Manifesto. Does Alvarez de Toledo protest too much, covering his own deceptions? Is he honest but inconsistent? Caught up in intrigues beyond his comprehension or control? Such questions are important. However, they remain entrapped in the binary possibilities that Alvarez de Toledo uses to structure his argument: one is either virtuous or one is corrupt.

It is also important to be conscious of another framework that tends to structure our readings: a retrospective gaze that frames the exile in relation to nationalities that did not yet exist in the early nineteenth century. When we call Alvarez de Toledo a traitor, we may assume that his choices were fairly clear: to support Cuban nationhood (implicitly good), or not. Or, knowing that Félix Varela would not launch a call in Philadelphia for an independent Cuba until a decade later, we generalize Alvarez de Toledo's options: to support Spanish American national independence movements (implicitly good), or not. Meanwhile, as we explore Alvarez de Toledo's texts within the framework of U.S. Latino literatures of exile, how useful is he as a predecessor to cultural forms of nationalism? After all, he chose to renounce his affiliations in the Americas, not to persist in the creation of community—and regardless of what we make of this personal choice, he also chose to play the rat in 1816 by providing Spanish functionaries with information on other insurgents in the Americas.

Reviewing these complications reveals how important it is to recognize that Alvarez de Toledo's departure and Justification contradict powerful expectations—so useful in terms of describing Varela and Martí—that a period of exile will transform the alienated man into the father of a nation and the (would-be) guarantor of its future. Similarly influential is the expectation that the exile's memoirs will effectively document that process of transformation. The structural powers of critical narrative (as well as its post-1959 echoes) are particularly impressive when we consider that Varela never actually returned to the island of Cuba after launching his independence campaign in the United States, although he shipped copies of El habanero there in envelopes and travelers' suitcases. As a much older man, Varela did return to Florida, where he had lived when young—but the region was now part of the United States, changing the kinds of proximity that Varela could...