Varieties of Spanish in the United States:

5. Cuban Spanish in the United States

98 5 Cuban Spanish in the United States Introduction Cuban Americans are the third-largest Hispanophone group in the United States, with a population of more than 1 million , the majority of whom speak Spanish. The presence of a large Cuban community in the United States has prompted a number of detailed phonological, sociolinguistic, and lexical studies, nearly all focusing on the educated speech of Havana. No comprehensive monograph on the Spanish of Cuba has yet been written, although a linguistic atlas project is in the works.1 Cuban Spanish is the variety most heard throughout Florida and is well represented in the greater New York City area as well as in other communities scattered across the country. Cuba was visited by Columbus on his first voyage, and small settlements were established almost immediately. The first Cuban town to achieve recognition was Santiago de Cuba, at the eastern end of the island near the already prospering colony of Española. In the second half of the sixteenth century, Spain adopted the system of sending two fleets to the Americas annually, to carry passengers and trade goods and to return with treasure. One fleet sailed to Veracruz, and the other to Nombre de Dios (later to Portobelo ). Both fleets stopped at Havana (which had been relocated to the north coast from its original location on the southern coast) upon arrival from Spain and also on the way back out of the Caribbean. This brought enormous prosperity to western Cuba, whereas eastern Cuba entered a period of CUBAN SPANISH IN THE UNITED STATES 99 social and economic stagnation from which it was never to fully recover. The results of this geopolitical imbalance are noticeable in contemporary Cuban Spanish, where the speech of the orientales (known as palestinos in contemporary Cuban slang) shares a greater similarity with Dominican and Puerto Rican Spanish than with that of Havana. The Cuban sugar industry received a boost with the Haitian Revolution in 1791, which destroyed the world’s largest source of sugar production. Many Haitian planters escaped to Cuba, some even bringing their slaves, and the rapid increase in world sugar prices resulted in a frenzied conversion of all available land in Cuba to sugar cultivation. Some three-quarters of a million slaves were imported in less than a century (Pérez 1988, 85), and in the first quarter of the nineteenth century African slaves represented as much as 40% of the total Cuban population. If to this figure is added the large free black population, Africans and Afro Cubans made up well over half the Cuban population for much of the nineteenth century. The demographic distribution was not even; in the larger cities, the population was predominantly of Spanish origin, whereas in rural sugar-growing areas, the Afro-Hispanic population was very high. The linguistic effects of this demographic shift were considerable, and the full range of phenomena attributable to the African presence in Cuba has sparked a lively debate. Also significant in nineteenth century Cuba was the influx of European immigration , primarily from Spain. Immigration from Galicia/Asturias and the Canary Islands was especially heavy in the second half of the nineteenth century. Canary immigration peaked in the first decades of the twentieth century, and was responsible for a considerable amount of linguistic transfer between the two territories. So concentrated was Spanish immigration that Cubans began to refer to all Spaniards from the Peninsula as gallegos (Galicians) and to the Canary Islanders as isleños (islanders). At the time of the Spanish-American War of 1898, almost half of Cuba’s white population had been born in Spain. Cuban Spanish in the United States: The Early Arrivals The presence of Cubans in the United States long preceded the Spanish-American War; indeed, by the end of the nineteenth century an estimated 100,000 Cubans lived in the United States, mostly in Tampa, Key West, and New York (García and Otheguy 1988, 166). Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, Cuban nationalists—foremost among them José Martí—used the United States as a safe haven for launching revolutionary schemes and publishing nationalist broadsides. This early presence was composed entirely of Cuban intellectuals who, in the eyes of U.S. citizens, were as much Spaniards as Cubans. The Cuban revolutionaries were welcomed as the champions of independence for one of the last Spanish colonies in the Americas, a reception no...