UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Cubans and the Caribbean South: Race, Labor, and Cuban Identity in Southern Florida, 1868-1928 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8tq27711 Author Gomez, Andrew Publication Date 2015 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Cubans and the Caribbean South: Race, Labor, and Cuban Identity in Southern Florida, 1868-1928 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in History by Andrew Gomez 2015 © Copyright by Andrew Gomez 2015 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Cubans and the Caribbean South: Race, Labor, and Cuban Identity in Southern Florida, 1868- 1928 by Andrew Gomez Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Los Angeles, 2015 Professor Frank Tobias Higbie, Chair This dissertation looks at the Cuban cigar making communities of Key West and Ybor City (in present-day Tampa) from 1868 to 1928. During this period, both cities represented two of largest Cuban exile centers and played critical roles in the Cuban independence movement and the Clear Havana cigar industry. I am charting how these communities wrestled with race, labor politics, and their own Cuban identity. Broadly speaking, my project makes contributions to the literature on Cuban history, Latino history, and transnational studies. My narrative is broken into two chronological periods. The earlier period (1868-1898) looks at Southern Florida and Cuba as a permeable region where ideas, people, and goods flowed freely. I am showing how Southern Florida was constructed as an extension of Cuba and that workers were part of broader networks tied to Cuban nationalism and Caribbean radicalism. Borne out of Cuba’s independence struggles, both communities created a political and literary atmosphere that argued for an egalitarian view of a new republic. Concurrently, workers began to ii experiment with labor organizing. Cigar workers at first tried to reconcile the concepts of nationalism and working-class institutions, but there was considerable friction between the two ideas. Influenced by Spanish anarchism, many cigar workers began to identify the limits of Cuban nationalism and instead argued for a working-class internationalism. The second period (1898-1928) examines how union busting and Jim Crow segregation greatly weakened the Cuban communities of Southern Florida. After the Cuban War of Independence, Cubans in Southern Florida built their most ambitious labor unions. However, manufacturers and city officials used intimidation and vigilantism to break up local unions. At the same time, I show how Jim Crow discrimination became a central facet of both communities. Mutual-aid societies, Cuban schools, and other cultural spaces became segregated. In the process, Cubans of color had to create their own institutions to support themselves. Black Cubans became ostracized during this period and were forced into communities with African Americans. Conversely, I explore how white Cubans used their race to better their positions in Florida society and become Cuban Americans. iii The dissertation of Andrew Gomez is approved. Lauren Derby Stephen A Aron Raul Fernandez Frank Tobias Higbie, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2015 iv To my mother and father v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction – The Early Cuban History of Florida………….…………………………………..1 1 – Key West: A History of Filibuster, Revolution, and Independence…………………………34 2 – Between Movements: Labor Militancy and Revolutionary Nationalism, 1886-1898……….73 3 – Radical Unionism and Vigilantism, 1898-1910……………………………………….……114 4 – Jim Crow Florida and Becoming Cuban American, 1880s-1920s…………………...…….154 Conclusion – From Radical Outposts to Tourist Attractions…………………………………...191 Bibliography…............................................................................................................................226 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am an unlikely academic. Born and raised in a working-class family in Miami, the journey to becoming a historian has been a long and arduous one paved by a great deal of work and even more help. An innumerable list of people have helped me along the way in ways both large and small. In lieu of undertaking the futile task of creating an exhaustive list of acknowledgements, I will focus here on people who contributed directly to this project and try to thank everyone else personally in the coming months. The members of my committee, Toby Higbie, Raul Fernandez, Robin Derby, and Steve Aron, have all been invaluable to my development as a scholar. They have been exceedingly kind with their time and were instrumental in broadening the scope and depth of this study. Toby, in particular, has guided me through my entire graduate education and has been an ideal mentor. His guidance and critiques have improved all of my work as a historian. Raul, similarly, has helped me with this project from an early stage and my research trips to Cuba would have been impossible without his help. More importantly, the UC-Cuba Initiative which he leads has given me and scores of other graduate students a space to test ideas and collaborate with like- minded scholars that write about Cuba from a wide variety of disciplinary perspectives. Robin was invaluable for helping me to contextualize this project within a broader Caribbean history and her comments and ideas are littered throughout this manuscript. Similarly, Steve’s broad conception of borderlands history is very much present in this work. His advice throughout my graduate career has been critical for this project and my general trajectory as a historian. I have also had many colleagues and other faculty mentors that have guided me through graduate school and several aspects of this project. Jorge Carlos Arias, Jessica Harris, Preeti vii Sharma, Nickolas de Carlo, and Devin McCutchen have all been wonderful colleagues at UCLA. Our endless discussions, academic and otherwise, provided me with many of my best experiences in Los Angeles and I thank them dearly for their friendship. I would also like to thank Ellen Dubois, Salvador Acosta, and Dan Whitesell for their comments and suggestions on earlier iterations of this project. Ellen, who commented on the earliest version of this work, and Sal and Dan, who commented on the development of my last chapter, provided encouragement and incisive comments that greatly improved this manuscript. A transnational study such as this one would have been unlikely without the financial and academic support of many institutions. This project was funded at various stages by several UCLA units—the Department of History, the Graduate Division’s Eugene-Cota Robles Fellowship, and the Latin American Institute were all critical to funding my research. Many other institutions also helped fund and facilitate my project. Grants from the Carey McWilliams Fund, the UC-Cuba Initiative, the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities and the academic sponsorship of Havana’s Instituto de Historia de Cuba helped me in countless ways. This project was also greatly aided by the work and devotion of the wonderful archivists at the University of South Florida’s Special Collections, the University of Florida’s Latin American and Caribbean Collection, the Monroe County Public Library’s Florida History Department, the Archivo Nacional de Cuba, and the Biblioteca Nacional José Martí. Andy Huse, Tom Hambright, Richard Phillips, Belkis Quesada and countless others made working in their archives a joy. Their love and dedication to the history of Florida and Cuba was infectious and propelled my long hours in their respective archives. I also wish to thank those closest to me: my parents and Caroline. In thinking about my parents, I am reminded of Hamlin Garland’s description of his own parents’ “silent heroism.” viii My mother and father have lived lives that may seem simple and unremarkable, but they are the most heroic people I know. They arrived to the United States poor and with an uncertain future but managed to raise three college-educated children and instilled in each of us their fundamental decency and restless work ethic. In regards to this project, I like to think that it began decades ago with my father’s photographic memory of his native Cuba and his countless stories about the island he loved and was forced to leave decades ago. The stories contained in the following pages retrace many of his own steps and harken back to the first of many times that Cubans looked to Southern Florida for salvation and the promise of a new beginning. Lastly, I wish to thank Caroline. Her love and support has been vital to this project and my life in Los Angeles. Writing a dissertation is exhausting work and she has served as an editor, advisor, and kind ear throughout the writing process. Her patience, humor, and love have meant the world to me and made my years in Los Angeles a joy. I look forward to many new adventures together, especially now that I can file this pesky dissertation. ix VITA Andrew Gomez received his B.A. in History and his B.S. in Social Studies Education from Florida International University. He was awarded his M.A. and C.Phil. in History by the University of California, Los Angeles. He specializes in the history of Latinos in the United States and is broadly interested in transnationalism, social history, oral history, and digital humanities. As an oral historian, he has led a series on the Justice for Janitors Movement in Los Angeles in concert with UCLA’s Center for Oral History Research. His article on the series, “An Oral History of the Justice for Janitors Movement: On Trauma, Central America, and the Undocumented,” was published by InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information 11, no. 1 (2015): 1-15. As a digital humanist, he has worked on several digital projects including a collaborative series of articles that were published on the Los Angeles Aqueduct Digital Platform. Starting in the fall of 2015, he will begin an appointment as the Andrew Mellon Post- Doctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Puget Sound.