Sugar, Cigars, and Revolution: The Making of Cuban New York by Lisandro Pérez (review)

In the wake of the British occupation of Cuba in 1762, creole planters and merchants transformed western Cuba into a highly productive export colony. Although Spain maintained political control over the island, the main axis of Cuban economic and cultural life shifted to the United States, which, by the middle of the nineteenth century served as not only the most important market for Cuban goods but also the main source of investment and the point of access to technology, financial services, consumer goods, and other trappings of modern life.

In Sugar, Cigars, and Revolution, Lisandro Pérez has written an immensely enjoyable book that significantly reframes our view of this process. He sets out to uncover and map the transnational Cuban communities that formed in New York as the city came to dominate the booming Cuba trade. Drawing on censuses, wills, newspapers, banking records, and correspondence, he builds rich portrait of the earliest Latino settlements in the city. Cuban New York, dominated by merchants, planters, and intellectuals, was a tiny patch in the vast quilt of immigrant New York. But the community served as key point of articulation between the United States and Cuba, and "the premier stage outside Cuba for the unfolding of Cuban political, sociocultural, and intellectual history" (259).

Pérez begins with the singular figure of Cristóbal Madan, the unofficial Cuban "consul" in the city in the 1820s and 1830s. As aristocratic Cubans began to travel to the city, Madan greeted visitors at the piers, guided them over icy streets, and helped situate them in lodgings. Meanwhile, the financial firm of Moses Taylor, on South Street, accepted the deposits of Cuban planters and merchants and also received, situated, and supervised the children of wealthy Cuban families—including some not so well behaved—sent to boarding schools in New York. This set of networks, Pérez maintains, made possible the literary interventions of canonical Cuban writers including Félix Varela and Nicolás Heredia, well as the annexationist movement of the 1850s. Madan was married to the sister of the famous Democratic publicist John O'Sullivan, the man who actually coined the phrase "Manifest Destiny." Thus Pérez is able to use Cuban New York as a window onto the entangled filibustering expeditions of William Walker and Narciso López.

The book shifts gears as Pérez describes the transformations brought by the first war of independence in Cuba, from 1868 to 1878. In this period, thousands of Cubans settled in New York, establishing households, newspapers, and social institutions. Pérez offers both an analysis of the Cuban population enumerated on 1870 census and a vivid account of the experience of the leading liberal thinkers in western Cuba in the first years of the war, including their displacement and rapid assumption of leadership in the New York community. In a lively and balanced account, Pérez narrates the conflicts between these newcomers, led by the wealthy planter Miguel de Aldama, and a less opulently wealthy faction represented by the delightfully acerbic pens of Emilia Casanova and her husband, Cirilo Valverde. Here the central argument of the book comes alive again, as Pérez suggests that when Valverde completed and published his foundational novel Cecilia Valdés in New York in 1882, the exceedingly negative depictions of Cuban planters were a reflection as much of his recent confrontations with Aldama as of his evolving views on slavery.

Finally, Pérez charts a second transformation when the war ended and many wealthier exiles returned to Cuba to reclaim—or attempt to reclaim—their fortunes. To chart the decline of the wartime community, he lyrically walks readers past the tombstones at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, connecting each forgotten crypt with archival sources in order to imagine historical figures whose bodies gave out, whose parents grieved, whose Masonic brothers conducted elaborate rites, or whose heirs battled in court over inheritance claims. The disarticulation of the elite Cuban settlement...