As the subtitle indicates, Suspect Freedoms explores the racial, gender, and class contradictions in the Cuban diaspora in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in New York. The work is, among many things, a history of the political activism of Afro-Cubans in the United States and in relation to African American politics. One element stands above all as a unifying idea, namely how Cubans in the diaspora grappled with what it meant to be Cuban, constructing in their imagination a workable definition of Cubanidad.
The author details how struggles over the future of slavery in the US were central to debates about independence in Cuba among New York Cubans. She documents how Cuba's annexation was part and parcel of the Manifest Destiny imaginary, a key to understanding the role of early attempts against the Spanish regime such as the Narciso López expeditions. Mirabal brings out realities that tend to be lightly covered in Cuban official history, before or after the 1959 Revolution, and which become magnified when reflected by the Cuban diaspora. Thus the weight of the anti-Spanish colonial, yet pro-annexation, pro-slavery, bent of the Cuban exile community before the US Civil War is made plain.
At the same time the author examines how the Afro-Cuban diaspora promoted ideas of independence and antiracism for over a hundred years through political and social clubs and various publications. The ideology of whitening the island, as delineated by José Antonio Saco in the nineteenth century, and racial divisions prevalent in Cuba, appear amplified in New York. While Afro-Cuban leaders pursued a policy of integration in exile organizations, some white exiles engaged in the opposite practice.
Mirabal identifies other contradictions. On the one hand, the Afro-Cuban diaspora community received support from African American leaders that advocated hemisphere-wide abolition of slavery as well as Cuban independence. Yet some of the same leaders ended up supporting the imperialist advance of the United States in the Caribbean in the late 1890s. Class differences within the community also emerged, notably a conflict in the 1890s between labor unionists and cigar shop owners, both of which supported Cuban independence. The author describes activities carried out by the New York Afro-Cuban diaspora in New York after independence, highlighting the role of leaders such as Martín Morúa Delgado and Rafael Serra, who resettled in Cuba and played, along with other black and white exile figures, significant roles in the early republic.
Other remarkable aspects of the Cuban diasporic experience in New York after independence are revealed in Suspect Freedoms. One was the key leadership role played by Afro-Cuban women in bringing together, politically and socially, the New York Cuban community. Among women leaders, Melba Alvarado stands out in the post-World War II period as one of the founders of the integrated, multinational Club Cubano Inter-Americano – its first woman president, and an invaluable preserver of the historical record of the club.
To Mirabal's great credit, her relentless pursuit of details in Alvarado's oral history led to a second and surprising discovery: in the 1930s, reflecting developments in the island, Afro-Cubans formed the Julio Antonio Mella Club, named after one of the founders of the Cuban Communist Party. The club was a racially integrated socialist association that advocated racial, economic, and social equality.
With the end of World War II and the advent of the anticommunist upsurge in the US, the club disbanded and its existence disappeared from historical records. A third great contribution by Mirabal was to decipher the manner in which the later Club Cubano Inter-Americano provided cultural and social cover for the Afro-Cuban radical activists, former members of the Julio Antonio Mella Club, during the height of the anticommunist era in the United States.
Mirabal avoids the tyranny of traditional periodization by decades, centuries, or wars. Her narrative is grounded in the dates dictated by the events and organizations she studies. So Mirabal has no problem with the overlap that actually existed during the years when a pro-slavery, pro-annexation, white Cuban diaspora held sway and Afro-Cuban, pro-independence, anti-slavery voices grew stronger. Refreshingly, Suspect Freedoms does not fit into any of the reified classifications of historical studies: it is a work of political, intellectual, cultural, and labor history. Mirabal's research is impressive because of her tripartite effort, utilizing available archival sources, discovering others, and creating some herself through her oral histories. Suspect Freedoms is a gratifying addition to related works by Antonio López, Christina Abreu, and Frank Guridy.Footnote 1
In sum, this is a wonderful book that offers a different lens with which to explore the connections between Cuban and US history, and the amplification in the diaspora of internal contradictions in the island. It ought to be read as a companion to established books on Cuban history such as Louis Pérez’s excellent Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution (1988).
