Cuba and Florida’s richly entangled history stretches back long before the island’s revolutionary government came to power in 1959. Two recent works focus on the Cubans and Cuban Americans who—along with their Bahamian, Spanish, Italian, African American, and white Anglo neighbors and coworkers—shaped the histories of Key West and Tampa from the late nineteenth through the mid twentieth centuries. Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South, by Sarah McNamara, and Constructing Cuban America: Race and Identity in Florida’s Caribbean South, 1868–1945, by Andrew Gomez, are rich studies that tackle migration and exile, race and class relations, Cuba’s independence wars, labor struggles and organizing, the diverse roles of women in community institutions and politics, the Great Depression and the New Deal, conceptions of Latin identity, and processes of Americanization. Each makes important contributions to our understanding of Cuban history in the United States, and in Florida in particular, that decenter post-1959 Miami.

In Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South, McNamara meticulously and beautifully presents Tampa as a city that at the turn of the century “brimmed with chaotic possibility” (1). Specifically, she focuses on Ybor City, the neighborhood of Tampa, which, to Cubans such as her great-great-grandmother Amelia Alvarez, “must have felt familiar and foreign at the same time” (2). Cuban cigar mogul and political exile Vicente Martínez Ybor fled the island for Key West in 1869 to escape arrest by Spanish officials and reestablished his formidable cigar business there. Then in the mid-1880s, Ybor moved on from Key West to Tampa to avoid labor strikes and political work stoppages. There, he built his cigar factory and his company town, Ybor City. The business dreams of an industrial magnate built Ybor City physically, but it was the labor, labor organizing, and community of the Cuban and Cuban American cigar workers he employed that built Ybor City culturally, socially, and politically. This is the story McNamara tells in her well-researched, convincingly argued, and engagingly narrated book.

Ybor City is divided into six sections: an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion. Covering approximately a century from the 1860s to the 1960s, the book progresses chronologically through three generations. The U.S. South, McNamara argues, is “an international, multiracial borderland,” necessitating transnational study (McNamara, 10). The ways in which gender, radical leftist politics, and foreign nationality fundamentally shaped Ybor City are central to the author’s arguments.

McNamara asserts the autonomy and agency her subjects had in Tampa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They had a proud and present sense of Cuban nationality before and after Cuban independence and, perhaps more importantly, they had a tradition of militant labor organizing. Tampa boasted its status as the Cigar Capital of the World, and cigar workers knew that this designation rested on their uniquely skilled labor, giving them leverage. “While Vicente Ybor envisioned his self-named company town as a place of control, it became a community of immigrant power” (47). This power, though, proved ephemeral, as changes in the tobacco industry weakened Cubans and Cuban Americans in Tampa in conjunction with attacks of nativism, white supremacy, and anti-radicalism that converged on Ybor City.

Here, McNamara arrives at two central arguments. First, Cuban and Cuban-American women had more room than men to negotiate nativist, white supremacist, and anti-radical repression because their gender shielded them from the worst of the local power elites’ attacks. Second, women union leaders and women rank-and-file workers risked and sacrificed for and alongside men. “Yet when it was women’s work, women’s value, and women’s skills that were in question,” McNamara observes, “men did not reciprocate” (78–79). Studying Cuban and Cuban American women including her ancestors in Ybor City, McNamara crafts a complex and illuminating history of women in labor and political activity, an immigrant community, an urban space, and an industry. Men, though fully present, are not the main characters in this history. The book is subtitled, after all, Crucible of the Latina South.

As time went on into the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, these women participated in what the author calls “the remaking process,” moving outward from largely “Latin” Ybor into the Anglo communities of the city and assimilating into U.S. culture (142). McNamara illustrates the accomplishment of this progression perfectly with a photograph of her mother as a child in a handmade 1963 Halloween costume of Miss America. (This photograph is one of many perfectly placed images throughout the book.) “The story of Ybor City,” the author concludes, “is not just the experience of building and resisting, it is also the history of surviving and remaking” (179). In other words, while a strong history of labor militancy, radical politics, and Cuban identity unquestioningly built Ybor City, we must understand the Cubans and Cuban Americans there as dynamic. For many decades before the fallout from the Cuban Revolution established Cuban Miami, Ybor was Cuban Florida—diverse, contested, in flux.

In Constructing Cuban America: Race and Identity in Florida’s Caribbean South, 1868–1945, Andrew Gomez toggles between Key West and Tampa across five chronological chapters, along with an introduction and a conclusion. The author studies race and race relations in these locations with a focus on Cubans and Cuban Americans but also placing them in the context of their broader communities—particularly Bahamian, African American, and white Anglo people and groups. The text has an arc that begins with the establishment of the remarkable multiethnic and multiracial character of these two cities during the late nineteenth century, progresses through the establishment of Jim Crow, and ends with racial segregation and white supremacist violence.

Gomez argues that Black and white Cubans founded the exile communities together and cooperatively during the Ten Years War (1868–1878), Cuba’s first of three wars of independence. During the wars, independence fighters on the island put together a racially integrated military at all ranks, and independence thinkers theorized a raceless future in which every Cuban regardless of race would be simply Cuban. As historian Ada Ferrer has shown, there was plenty of racial animus and discrimination in Cuba during the wars, but undeniably the Cuban racial reality at this time was remarkable for its era. Remarkable, too, was Radical Reconstruction in the United States. Placing the project of building Cuban Key West and Cuban Tampa in the context of the Cuban independence struggle, as well as Radical Reconstruction, Gomez argues that the construction of early Cuban Florida was an experiment in building racial democracy. The picture he paints might strike some U.S. historians as extraordinary:

This scene would not have been possible in many places in the United States in the 1870s.

Gomez argues that Florida’s labor movement, driven as it was by Cuban and Cuban American workers, encompassed “the twin discussions of race and independence” (54), creating “opportunities for collaboration and fissure” (42) during the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth. However, the “relative tolerance” in multiethnic and multiracial Key West and Ybor City was eroded over time by Florida Democrats courting the white Cuban vote (33). Anti-labor violence and white supremacist violence went hand in hand. As labor organizing—the source of power and multiracial solidarity among Cubans and Cuban Americans in Florida—began to break down, so too did their power and multiracial solidarity. Those Cubans who could pass as white sought alliance with white Anglos to gain advantages in the Jim Crow South. “Cuban whiteness was a process,” Gomez writes (102). “By the 1930s, Black and white Cubans were only loosely linked to one another” (107). Thus, Constructing Cuban America ultimately arcs away from multiracial, multiethnic Cuban Florida to racially divided, assimilated Cuban Americans—with the early potential for different paths abandoned.

Gomez’s text is weakened by inconsistencies. For example, readers familiar with Cuban history will be puzzled at the author’s claim that “multiracial coalitions” were “unthinkable” in 1870s Cuba, especially since elsewhere he makes the opposite claim (70). At other puzzling points in the book, readers are left searching for citations that are not included. Muddled or missing information distracts from this important contribution to our understanding of Cuban histories in the United States.

Considering these books side by side, the reader is left wishing Gomez had focused on Key West, which seems throughout the work to be where his heart is, instead of toggling back and forth, so that his treatment could have been as comprehensive and carefully rendered as McNamara’s is of Ybor. As a place-based local history, Ybor City offers extraordinary depth and detail. As a history that compares and contrasts Cuba and the United States, Key West and Tampa, and among various ethnic communities, Constructing Cuban America sometimes feels as though it is trying to do too much. Nevertheless, McNamara and Gomez both boost our understanding of Cubans in the United States tremendously: their labor, communities, politics, and identities in Florida before 1959.