Ideology and economics are not enough to explain revolutions. Ronald Syme showed in The Roman Revolution how prosopographical study reveals networks that bind agents and turn bystanders into activists. Among recent contributions to the tradition is Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof´s study of “black and brown” Cubans and Puerto Ricans in Key West and New York in the years that preceded Cuban independence. The question he explores—why Cubans of color collaborated in the national movement—engaged contemporaries, including José Martí, who applauded black friends for joining revolutionaries who “oppressed them” (153), and Booker T. Washington, for whom “the Negro” was “leader of the Cuban forces” (237).
A bigger historical problem beckons: why the history of race relations in Cuba and Puerto Rico diverged from that of the continental United States, despite the relatively late abolition of slavery in all three territories. No equivalent of the parti-colored “Cuban race,” celebrated in poetry by Nicolás Guillén and sociology by Fernando Ortiz, was imaginable in the United States. Hoffnung-Garskof portrays Cuban life in New York with painstaking scholarship and meticulous and sometimes vivid detail. The huge cast of characters is hard to manage, at least for readers; the pace is never rapid, the going never easy. The author's comparison of his work to a novel (9) is perhaps flattering. Some of the impressive apparatus, including maps of every relevant location in New York City, is supererogatory. Also, it is disturbing to find ‘cubano’ translated as “Cuban man” (168). When evidence gives out, recourse to musing on what “we can only imagine” (140) is frequent.
But perseverance brings rewards. Hoffnung-Garskof reconstructs networks in educational, political, and social clubs, cigar factory readings, press subscriptions, and the lodges of Masons and Oddfellows, which sometimes applied color bars. At the heart of the networks are three ambitious émigrés from Cuba who arrived in New York in 1885: Rafael Serra and Juan and Gerónimo Bonilla. They helped new arrivals with the only means of adaptation to the bewildering city: finding “a friend or countryman” (99). They chaired high-minded meetings and gatherings where black Cubans could “meet sweethearts and eat ice-cream” (96). They shared bond-forging lunches of salt cod and chopped kidneys (114). They bridged, as far as was possible, the social distance between black Cuban servants and their rich white Cuban employers in otherwise inaccessibly desirable neighborhoods. They forged a “network of friends” (228).
An atmosphere of machismo is ever detectable. Martí defended himself against accusations of effeminacy by boasting that his accuser could not “fit into my underwear” (128). Serra's “trademark” was “a coalition built on love and tenderness among men” (138). But the author also shows women—especially the midwives who darted between households—as quietly effective agents of community solidarity (231). He traces the remarkable trajectory of the midwife Gertrudis Heredia from “darkness and impiety” (27) to marriage with Serra and leadership among black female émigrés.
Like all truthful histories, Hoffnung-Garskof´s story of “the transition of an immigrant community into a political movement” (130) is checkered. Some black Cubans and some white allies wavered from the revolutionary cause, for reasons sometimes pragmatic and sometimes nakedly racist. As victory drew near, factional infighting and personality conflicts disrupted unity. Most contemporaries acknowledged the existence of “a class of color” (7, 149) within and sometimes at odds with the potential Cuban nation (174-6). Yet, blacks remained almost uniformly faithful to nationalism, thanks in part to Martí, whose patronage of black sodalities was unwavering, and to the help of Puerto Ricans, such as the indefatigable “man of print,” Sotero Figueroa.
At bottom, perhaps, island traditions were less hostile to racial collaboration than those of the continental United States. Racial intermarriage was routine in Martí's “mestizo America” (211), where whites saw intermarriage as “perfecting and improving” blacks (202, 208). There was “less hatred to extinguish” offshore (48). Fittingly, when Serra revisited New York in 1892, the immigrant official marked his race as “Cuban” (268).
