Latin America and the Question of Cuban Independence

In a famous account of his travels, titled El destino de un continente, the Argentine writer Manuel Ugarte describes his somewhat disconcerting encounter with the Cuban ex-president José Miguel Gómez while traveling through Latin America during the 1920s. Ugarte, a committed advocate of panhispanismo—the idea that Spanish America was and should be unified by its shared Spanish heritage, especially in light of the "threat" from Anglo-Saxon culture—had come to Cuba to give a series of lectures. Shortly after one of his presentations, the Argentine was introduced to Gómez, who took Ugarte to task for his criticism of Cuba's close relationship to the United States. "You reproach us," Gómez said, "for not defending our legacy of Spanish civilization, but what have all of you [Latin Americans] done to encourage us, to support us, to make us feel that we are not alone?" ¹ Taken aback and made suddenly self-conscious by the accusation, Ugarte concluded that the Cuban was admonishing him for failing to uphold the very principles he was espousing in his lectures. "It seemed as if, through the voice of her representative, all Cuba was saying, 'It is not we who broke the link; it was you who broke it in allowing it to be cut.'" After some time and much thought, Ugarte came to the realization that "Cuba was not alone responsible for the Cuban situation. Some responsibility was also borne by Latin America." ² Through his encounter with Gómez, Ugarte was forced to recognize the limitations of framing what he referred to as the "Cuban situation" exclusively in the context of a cultural war between the United States and Spain. Indeed, the ex-president's challenge inspired him to reconsider Cuba's nineteenth-century struggles with both Spanish colonialism and U.S. imperialism in a distinctly inter-Latin American context.

Like Ugarte, early scholars of the Cuban independence period examined the wars almost exclusively in relation to the decline of Spanish power in Cuba and the rise of U.S. imperialism. ³ However, a number of contemporary historians have criticized this de-centering of Cuba in its own story and worked to do justice to internal factors that affected the independence movements and their aftermaths. They have generated a series of excellent studies, emphasizing among other things the relationships between independence and emancipation, gender and revolution, race and nation, and anarchism and insurgency. ⁴ The recent re-examination of the 1895 War of Independence by John Lawrence Tone is especially noteworthy for its commitment to analyzing the Hispano-Cuban conflict on its own terms and not as a footnote in a larger story of the transfer of imperial power. ⁵ There are also a number of new works that, while maintaining the importance of the U.S.-Cuba relationship, emphasize the transnational aspects of that relationship rather than its instances of high diplomacy or imperial treachery. These include Kristen Hogonson's Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, Lillian Guerra's The Myth of José Martí: Conflicting Nationalisms in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba, and Rodrigo Lazo's Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States.

Recent work on the Cuba-U.S. relationship includes studies of U.S.-based émigré communities, which take a new approach in that they acknowledge the roles of émigrés other than the most famous ones. It is true that the United States has been home to the largest Cuban émigré community in the Americas and several of the most active. ⁶ But it is also true that sizable communities of émigrés lived elsewhere in Latin America. Cuban communities in Latin American countries were smaller and far less concentrated than those in the United States, but they were no less engaged in following and debating the war effort and in organizing revolutionary clubs that included nationals of the countries in which they found themselves, as well as Cuban expatriates. ⁷

Thus, while recent scholarship has brought fresh approaches to the study of the...