An African American and Latinx History of the United States
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Because of the connections between Black abolitionists and Cuban revolutionary emigrés in the United States, African Americans placed Cuba at the center of their concerns. Port cities such as Baltimore continued serving as strategic nodes of communication for receiving and spreading word about the progress of the antislavery and independence movements in Cuba. New Orleans, San Francisco, and New York were also places where African Americans could receive news directly from seafaring crews about goings-on in Cuba.
THE MAKING OF THE CUBAN SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT
As the Civil War was ending, the New Orleans Black Republican insisted that the period which came to be known as “Reconstruction” must be global in scope. The paper insisted, “We have great work to accomplish before we can rest satisfied. There are thousands of our brethren now upon the Island of Cuba, wearing the yoke of bondage, and they too must be free.”11 The Cuban War of Liberation, also known as the Ten Years’ War, fought between 1868 and 1878, inspired African Americans and infused Black Reconstruction with special meaning. The desperate struggle of Cuban patriots against the Spanish reminded African Americans of their own harrowing journey to freedom. Numerous US cities passed resolutions in support of Cuba Libre, and newspapers published accounts of atrocities inflicted by the Spanish on the inhabitants of the island. However, it would fall to Black organizers and institutions to build a nationwide Cuban solidarity movement based on the principles of emancipatory internationalism.12 Efforts to build a coordinated campaign in support of the Cuban struggle quickened in the wake of the election of Ulysses S. Grant, because Grant had publicly denounced Spanish conduct in the Ten Years’ War.13
The centerpiece of the campaign was the national petition drive, which was facilitated by the Cuban Anti-Slavery Committee. Organizers circulated petitions in support of Cuban independence at religious gatherings, Emancipation commemorations, and Fifteenth Amendment ceremonies, among other settings. The goal was to obtain as many signatures as possible and hand-deliver the signed petitions to Congress and President Grant. The national petition operation kept organizers, churches, fraternal societies, labor organizations, and other supportive groups in contact with each other while creating measurable benchmarks of success. This newest antislavery crusade also mobilized Black voting power to convince legislatures in key Southern states, such as South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida, to pass strongly worded resolutions in support of Cuban liberation that would then be sent to the White House.
A Black assemblyman and Union Army veteran, Robert Elliot, introduced resolutions in support of Cuban independence before the South Carolina House of Representatives in 1869. Elliot’s resolutions reveal the early goals of the Cuban solidarity movement, including resolutions to recognize the “independence of the Republic of Cuba” and a promise to support military action against the Spanish:
Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the State of South Carolina, now met and sitting in General Assembly, that it would be eminently right and proper [for] the Government of the United States to recognize the independence of the Republic of Cuba, without further delay; and we hereby appeal to our Government to accord such recognition at the earliest possible day.14
On its way to the US Congress, the South Carolina resolution joined a similar one that had been submitted by an African American assembly in New York.15
As the Cuban solidarity movement took shape, resolution demands changed over time. Proposals for US military intervention for Cuba Libre were scaled back in favor of the granting of belligerency status and the recognition of Cuban independence—which would make the insurgent forces eligible to receive arms and support from the outside world. Working with members of the Cuban Junta in New York, which helped coordinate international support for the insurgents, Black petitioners emphasized the ability of the resistance forces to defeat the Spanish, if only they received material support from the outside world.16 African Americans did not trust the United States to embark on a military operation without imposing its imperial will on Cuba.
Frederick Douglass, Governor P. B. S. Pinchback, William Wells Brown, George L. Ruffin, and other luminaries spoke at the Colored National Convention held in New Orleans in 1872.17 “The wildest applause greeted Mr. Ruffin’s proposition to make a move on Cuba for the abolition of the horrible slavery that prevails there. He said that if the Fenians could cross the Atlantic to fight for the freedom of their countrymen, the colored men can cross the narrow strip of water that separates Florida from Cuba.”18 An African American correspondent in Salt Lake City, Utah, admonished the readers of the Elevator on the Fourth of July weekend,
While we are rejoicing over our national anniversary, let us not forget the patriotic sons of Cuba in the struggles for their national existence, from the misruling of the government of Spain; whose troops, brute-like and fiendish in disguise, have perpetuated acts of brutalities and cruelties on the Cuban patriots; not for the first time have they disgraced her banner and civilization.19
At the height of Reconstruction, the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet delivered the keynote address at the founding convention of the Cuban Anti-Slavery Committee held at Cooper Union in New York City, the epicenter of the national Cuban solidarity movement, in December 1872. African Americans, Cuban émigrés, reporters, and curious onlookers bristled with excitement as they filled the Great Hall to overflowing. Black leaders in New York could remain in close contact with members of the Cuban “Junta,” Cuban exiles in the United States who published educational materials on the anticolonial struggle in Cuba from their New York office.20 During the Civil War, whites had rioted and killed scores of African Americans in protest of the institution of the military draft in the city. Garnet had recruited Black Union soldiers during the war and had narrowly escaped with his life.21 He spoke with an authority based on decades of sacrifice, and his audience revered him. The Spanish government sent special emissaries to disrupt the meeting, but Garnet smiled over the crowd as the Spanish king’s special agents were shouted down by enthusiastic participants.22
The Cuban patriot José Martí said of Garnet, “His eyes evinced honesty, his lips truth, his whole person respect. He rendered it and inspired it.”23 Garnet began his speech by assuring New Yorkers that the work of the antislavery movement was far from completed. He warmly welcomed the freedom fighters from Cuba, saying, “I see before me tonight many native Cubans, who, driven by the fierce fires of Spanish oppression, have sought and found shelter in our free land.” There was a sense of urgency in the air, and nearly every sentence that Garnet uttered was punctuated by tremendous applause. “Permit me to assure you, my exiled friends,” Garnet continued, “that I know that I am justified in saying to you that this meeting, and millions of American citizens, bid you God speed in your noble cause.”24
Garnet drew on his observations of slavery in Cuba when he had sailed to the island years earlier as a young cabin boy. Quoting the great Cuban poet Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (Plácido), Garnet combined experience and analysis to argue that liberation was attainable in Cuba:
I have seen slave ships enter the port of Havana, and cargoes of miserable men and women, some dying and some of them dead, dragged and hurried from the decks of slavers and thrown upon the shores. ([from the audience] “Shame!”) You cannot forget, Cubans, the immortal mulatto poet of your country, the brave and heroic Plácido (“Bravo!” and continued cheers). . . . When he was led forth to death he cried:
“O, Liberty! I hear thy voice calling me
Deep in the frozen regions of the North, afar,
With voice like God’s and vision like a star.”25
Garnet used every rhetorical tool at his disposal to weld together his multiracial, multilingual, and multinational audience into supporters of one common cause. The meeting ended with the creation of a national coordinating committee. As cheers pulsed through the Cooper Union’s Great Hall, the meeting’s organizers circulated the national petition calling on the federal government “to ac
cord to the Cuban Patriots that favorable recognition that four years’ gallant struggle for freedom justly entitles them to.”26 The headquarters of the Cuban Anti-Slavery Committee were established at 62 Bowery. Organizers immediately set about planning an educational campaign to support the petition drive, and the assembled pledged to spread the campaign throughout the country. Mass meetings were immediately called in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and other cities.
Ultimately, Garnet planned to present the petitions to President Grant for immediate action in the cause of Cuban liberty. “The colored citizens of New York are doing a good thing in protesting against the conduct of Spain to Cuba,” the Christian Recorder wrote. “It is high time that liberty be brought in, even if Spain has to be kicked out.”27 Building upon preexisting networks of communication as well as the bedrock of emancipatory internationalism, the Cuban solidarity movement grew rapidly. Soon after the Cooper Institute assembly, a mass meeting was held in Boston, and resolutions were passed “calling on the American people to urge the Administration to extend all legal aid to the patriots of Cuba in their struggle for freedom.”28
Early in 1873, African Americans in Baltimore gathered at the historic Madison Street Colored Presbyterian Church to consider “adopting measures to petition the Congress of the United States to tender the powerful mediation of this great government towards ameliorating the sad condition of a half million of our brethren now held in slavery in the island of Cuba by Spain.” The attendance was good, a number of those present being of “the gentler sex.”29 Samuel R. Scottron, a renowned inventor and cofounder of the Cuban Anti-Slavery Committee, was the keynote speaker. Scottron urged his audience to recall that “they had passed through the Egyptian bondage and through the sea of blood, and having become clothed in the habiliments of freedom, knew how to sympathize with the 500,000 of their own race bowed down in Cuba.”
Black Baltimoreans, Scottron stated, should “petition the government of the United States to extend a liberal policy to the colored race in Cuba. The 800,000 votes of the colored people here would have their weight in that direction.” A cadre of speakers reported on the resolutions being brought forward in the northeastern cities.30 Toward the end of the evening’s spirited gathering, Scottron returned to the speaker’s podium in order to read the text of the national petition directed to President Grant:
We, the petitioners, citizens of the United States, duly grateful for our own disenthrallment and enfranchisement, truly comprehending the genius of free government, and heartily sympathizing with the oppressed in every land, have the honor to call your attention to the existence of slavery in the island of Cuba, and the suffering condition of more than five hundred thousand of our race in consequence thereof. The repeated and flagrant violations of the most sacred treaty obligations and broken faith of the Spanish government in regard to slavery in Cuba, running through a period of more than twenty years, is sufficient evidence that slavery and the slave trade will be perpetually continued in event of the triumph of the Spanish arms in the war now going on in that island. We respectfully submit that we have the fullest assurances that in event of the triumph of the Cuban patriots the benefit of freedom will be secured to our enslaved brethren. We should therefore pray that the government of the United States accord to the Cuban patriots that favorable recognition to which a four years’ gallant struggle in the interest of freedom justly entitles them.31
A half century earlier, Black Baltimoreans had assembled to make a public statement connecting their aspirations for freedom with the revolutionary works of Toussaint L’Ouverture and Simón Bolívar, and the wars of independence in Latin America and the Caribbean. Emancipatory internationalism had been born in the first stormy years of the republic when African Americans and their allies recognized that slavery, racial capitalism, and imperialism were fatally intertwined. Now, even as they were embroiled in struggles for land, the right to vote, and protection from Ku Klux Klan terrorism, African Americans insisted that their emancipation was incomplete as long as oppression existed elsewhere.
African Americans drew on their own experiences in making the Civil War a war for freedom in order to build the Cuban solidarity movement. The San Francisco Elevator argued,
The Cuban struggle is not for national independence alone, although that was the original motive which induced the patriots to revolt against the power and tyranny of Spain; but finding national independence and personal slavery incompatible and incongruous ideas, and knowing that they could never achieve their object without the aid of the slaves, decreed emancipation on the same grounds that President Lincoln issued his Proclamation of Emancipation i.e., military necessity.32
A movement in support of the Cuban solidarity campaign blossomed in 1873. Organizing centers emerged in Charleston, South Carolina; Key West, Florida; Washington, DC; and other regions where Black Republicanism was strong.33 The New York Times announced, “The colored citizens of Columbia [Washington, DC] will hold a mass-meeting on Thanksgiving Eve to give expression of their sympathy for the Cuban cause. Frederick Douglass will be one of the speakers.”34 Both the California State Colored Men’s Convention and the National Civil Rights Convention, held in Washington, DC, at the end of the year, passed strongly worded resolutions of support for the Cuban patriots.35 Seeking to build the campaign’s momentum, the Reverend W. H. Hillery, the keynote speaker at the fourth annual celebration of the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, held in Chico, California, proclaimed, “Cuba, after more than five years of war and rapine, shouts forth to the world—Liberty or Death.”36 Leaders of the Cuban Anti-Slavery Committee met with Cuban insurgents in the United States to strategize; the committee also worked with white organizations that shared the same broad agenda and corresponded regularly with British antislavery organizations.37
Efforts to build international solidarity were not without tensions and contradictions. African American religious leaders’ concerns for their counterparts in Africa, Latin America, and Cuba were often sprinkled with notions of paternalism and of Protestant uplift as antidotes to generations of slavery, colonialism, and Catholicism.38 “What is the status of these Cuban and Puerto Rico freedmen?” asked the national organ of the African Methodist Episcopal church. “Their religious status, for they have no educational status. They can scarcely be called Christian. The majority of them fresh from Africa are still doubtless in a pagan state; or if they possess the least shadow of Christianity, it is of the lowest Catholic type.”39 Exuberance over their historic triumph over American slavery in 1865 led some African Americans to view their counterparts in the other regions as needing tutelage. Once the anticolonial struggle in Cuba gained momentum, however, African American paternalism was generally transformed into admiration for the Cuban people.
Black political leaders and state legislatures in the South played an important role in the Cuban solidarity movement by demonstrating that the international struggle had a mass base of African American voters. A giant of Louisiana politics, P. B. S. Pinchback, a Union Army veteran and the United States’ first African American governor, was also a leader of the Cuban Anti-Slavery Committee. State Representative J. Henri Burch of Louisiana shepherded a resolution passed by the Louisiana legislature urging the United States Congress “to give its material assistance in the suppression of slavery in the Island of Cuba”; in the same session the legislature passed a civil rights bill.40 For his efforts, the Cuban Junta named Senator Burch “General Representative of the Republique of Cuba Abroad.”41 The 1873 Convention of Colored Men in Louisiana placed the cause of the “barbarous rule of Spanish authority in Cuba” alongside the effort to end electoral fraud and Ku Klux Klan violence in Louisiana.42 The Louisiana Republican Party platform pledged to rebuild their war-torn state, improve race relations, advocate for a national civil rights bill, and remind the Republican Party “that we sympathize with the patriotic men in Cuba who fight for liberty, and that we urge upon the national Congress the earl
y recognition of the independence of Cuba, and hereby instruct our Representatives in Congress to use their best efforts and influence to this end.”43
South Carolina lieutenant governor A. G. Ranier presided over a Union League Hall meeting in Washington, DC, called in support of the Cuban patriots.44 Ranier subsequently gave a rousing keynote address at the Maryland Union Republican Association meeting that included speeches by Governor Pinchback and African American congressman John R. Lynch of Mississippi. Ranier “concluded by saying that the Republican party in Congress could not afford to not pass financial measures, a recognition of Cuba and the Civil Rights bill.”45 In Florida, Congressman Josiah T. Walls, a Union Army veteran, helped lead a deliberative process that resulted in a joint resolution from the state legislature calling upon the federal government to recognize the Cuban insurgency.46 Walls subsequently gave a landmark speech in the US House of Representatives in support of the Cuban insurgents. The Florida congressman reviewed the history of the Latin American independence struggles of the early nineteenth century and insisted that his resolution in support of Cuba be framed “in obedience to what I understand as the prevailing sentiment which soars above the selfishness of traditional dynasties or the soulless ordinances of international law.”47 Here was a new vision of freedom made possible by a national movement organizing in the name of emancipation without borders.