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Copyright (c) 2005 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.




Introduction

On the Fourth of July, 1850, New York City saw the appearance of El Horizonte, a bilingual newspaper published and edited by Miguel T. Tolón, a poet and journalist from Matanzas, Cuba. The front page featured Tolón's "El Pobre Desterrado" (The poor exile), a poem that pronounced a desire to raise a "war cry" and take up arms for Cuba's liberty. On the same page, a Spanish-language article called for the establishment in Cuba of a republican government based "on the model of the United States, the archetype of all political constitutions conceived until now."[1] Another article, "The Fourth of July," appeared in English and Spanish versions on page 3, proclaiming, "Our hearts, too, swell with the glorious feelings of the sons of Washington;—yet the stifled and heart reviving groan of our country sounds louder than the cheers of the American people, and we deeply mourn amidst the rejoicing multitude."[2] "The Fourth of July" captured the contradictory tones of the newspaper, which was simultaneously optimistic about the dawn of a new future on the "horizon" and mournful about Cuba's status as a Spanish colony. While Tolón found common ground with the "sons of Washington" based on the search for a government in opposition to European colonialism, he also stepped away from the national U.S. celebration to note the different circumstances faced by Cubans on the island and in exile.

A forgotten part of print culture history, the inaugural issue of El Horizonte is marked by an uncanny sense of dislocation and raises a variety of questions. Why is an exiled writer known in Cuban literary history as one of the island's patriotic poets putting out a newspaper that praises the United States as a model republic? Who are his potential readers? What are the economic implications of the word "poor" to describe exiles? Does the publication of "El Pobre Desterrado" in a New York newspaper change the way we interpret a poem that has been anthologized in Cuba as a part of that country's national literature?[3] These questions, which return in various guises throughout this study, call for an analytical approach that takes into account both the U.S. context of publication and Cuban cultural influences on these texts. In turn, they prompt a reconsideration of the relationship between the publication of newspapers and other texts by Cuban exiles and historical events that brought them to U.S. cities in the mid-nineteenth century, giving rise to a community of writers who composed journalistic and literary pieces for readers in Cuba even as they grappled with the demands of life in the antebellum United States.

Tolón was among a cadre of Cuban exiles who settled in the United States in the late 1840s and 1850s to publish poems, newspaper articles, and pamphlets that were highly critical of the island's colonial government. Free from the limits imposed by censors in Cuba, these writers believed that the United States offered an opportune setting for publishing tracts that would persuade the Cuban population to rise against the colonial government on the island. Writing to Cuba, they also simultaneously tried to reach English- and Spanish-language readers in the United States. Some Cuban exiles called on the United States for help in ousting Spanish rule in Cuba and in installing a government based on reason and democratic participation. This turn to the United States is important to "El Pobre Desterrado," a poem that has been read as an inscription of the historical rupture created by exile and as a political adaptation of the Spanish romance featuring eroticized martyrdom.[4] The poem displays the voice of an exile explaining to a woman in the United States why his heart is committed to another place. Asking the woman to remember him when he is gone to fight for his country, the speaker envisions himself in the ranks of liberators on their native soil. On the front page of El Horizonte, the poem's language of republicanism and the U.S. Revolution resonate: Spain is despotic (despótica España and el déspota osado); the exile has a patria; he echoes Patrick Henry by calling for liberty or death (Libre o morir); and the U.S. woman is connected to a glorious eagle (águila gloriosa), which shelters the exile under its wings. In the United States, the poem proclaims, there is no room for the servility of colonial subjection. Thus, the literary performance of "El Pobre Desterrado" emerges within a print culture connected to both Cuba and the United States.

The dual influences of island colony and budding empire fueled the production of a dozen newspapers in New York and New Orleans between 1848 and the U.S. Civil War, including La Verdad (The truth) (New York, 1848-60), El Mulato (New York, 1854), and El Eco de Cuba (Cuba's echo) (New York, 1855). These newspapers, written largely in Spanish but sometimes containing English-language sections, were packed with polemical articles debating the future of Cuba and proposing strategies for organizing military attacks from the United States as well as an internal revolution on the island. The papers were produced by some of Cuba's most distinguished writers, among them Cirilo Villaverde (1812-94), Gaspar Betancourt Cisneros (1803-66), Pedro Santacilia (1826-1910), and Juan Clemente Zenea (1832-71). These writers remained in the United States for as long as several decades, working as activists and publishing revolutionary texts. Their newspapers were more than a venue for political journalism, as they contained poems, many of which were later collected in books such as Santacilia's El Arpa del Proscripto (The banished man's lyre) (1856), Tolón's Leyendas Cubanas (Cuban legends) (1856), and the anthology El Laúd del Desterrado (The exile's lute) (1858), all published in New York. In other cases, the work of writers led to nonfiction books such as Santacilia's historical study, Lecciones Orales sobre la Historia de Cuba, Pronunciadas en el Ateneo Democrático Cubano de Nueva York (Orations concerning the history of Cuba, delivered in New York's Democratic Cuban Athenaeum) (New Orleans, 1859).

During the nineteenth century, writers from Cuba published more than seventy newspapers in the United States. These newspapers varied dramatically in size, length of publication, and in the positions they took on the island's future and its relationship with the United States.[5] The best-known of the nineteenth-century Cuban exiles is José Martí (1853-95), a poet, essayist, and political operative who first arrived in New York in 1880, published his writings in newspapers, and worked tirelessly to build a coalition for Cuban independence until his death on the battlefield.[6] Martí's essay, "Our America," has become a staple in discussions of inter-American cultural studies in part because it articulates questions about power relations between the United States and what Martí calls "our America," the "romantic nations of the continent and the suffering islands of the sea" that endure European models of culture and economic control.[7] "Our America," as José David Saldívar argues, positions Martí "as a firm anti-imperialist who wrote about the emergent empire: 'I know the monster; I have lived in its entrails.'"[8] But decades before Martí developed his political program in the United States, his compatriots attempted to wield that "monster" to their benefit. By the time Martí arrived in New York, Cuban intellectuals had been publishing in the United States for more than fifty years and had failed in their efforts to rally the U.S. government and public to support their revolutionary efforts. Thus, the panorama that Martí confronted in the United States differed from that faced by writers in preceding decades.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Cuba's exiled writers were in many cases willing to embrace U.S. constitutional principles, if not the United States itself. They drew inspiration and political ideals from the writings of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Samuel Adams and from the U.S. Declaration of Independence. In addition to the content of U.S. revolutionary documents, exiles were captivated by the relationship between text and revolution exemplified by a pamphlet such as Common Sense. Their wish to recreate el sentido común for Cuba is an example of what Michael Warner describes as the "far-reaching impact both on the continent and in the New World" of the U.S. paper war waged by men of letters in the eighteenth century.[9] Of course, the historical and geographic circumstances differed for the revolutionary effort of the North American colonies in the 1770s and the Cuban exile anticolonial project in the mid-nineteenth century. Cubans attempted to reach from one country to another; consequently, their failure to oust Spain in the 1850s calls attention to the limits of a print culture that transcended national borders. I discuss in more detail throughout this book the particular challenges that Cubans faced in their publishing projects, emphasizing that difficulties were interconnected with a geopolitical battle between the declining Spanish empire and the expanding U.S. empire. While exiles looked back to the principles of the U.S. fight against monarchical colonialism, the U.S. government looked to expand its territorial holdings at the expense of populations in the West and even the Caribbean. Congress and several presidents debated what was then known as "the Cuba question"—namely, "Would Cuba join the Union?" Many Cuban exiles in the antebellum United States compromised on the possibility of full independence and democracy for the island and sought to replicate the type of slave-based society found in the United States. In turn, these exiles threw their support behind Manifest Destiny proponents who salivated at the thought of annexing Cuba.

A picture of anticolonial exiles supporting U.S. expansionism exemplifies the contradictions that emerged when Latin American intellectuals grappled with ideals in writings from the U.S. Revolution while witnessing the development of U.S. expansionism in the nineteenth century. Students of Latin American history are liable to find walls bearing the graffiti inscription "Yanqui go home" as well as letters of admiration to Washington. In the early nineteenth century, some Latin American intellectuals looked to the U.S. Declaration of Independence to develop their anticolonial fight against Spain. As early as 1812, the pseudonymous "El Amigo de Los Hombres" (The friend of men) published a Spanish-language pamphlet in Philadelphia praising "English America" among empires and nations that were successful because they "established liberty and brilliant prosperity."[10] This author was not alone. Many prominent Latin American intellectuals viewed geopolitics in the Americas not along a border dividing North from South but along an ideological and even natural difference between the Americas and Europe, particularly Spain.[11] In that sense, the separation of America as a hemisphere promoted by the Monroe Doctrine worked hand in hand with opposition to Spain in some sectors of Latin America.

The attitudes of Cubans toward the United States, as I show throughout this study, were neither monolithic nor static. As a culture of exile and print developed in the antebellum period, some Cubans adopted expansionist positions, while others challenged the ascendancy of the United States and its slave-based economy. Thus, while the dominant strain in writings by Cuban exiles during the antebellum period is pro-United States, heterogeneous and contradictory discourses circulated as a result of the complex relationships and political alliances prompted by U.S. expansionism and Spanish colonialism.

The defining movement for Cuban exiles in the antebellum period was a series of expeditions known as "filibustering." Before "filibuster" became common usage for a U.S. Senate legislative maneuver, the word was used pejoratively to disparage soldiers of fortune who attempted to seize parts of Latin America. From the Dutch vrijbuiter, or "freebooter," modified into the French flibustier, the Spanish filibustero became common in the seventeenth century as an epithet for pirates who plundered the Spanish West Indies. This sense of the filibuster as a criminal adventurer, one who seizes objects by force, infused the English "filibuster"—variously spelled "fillibuster," "filibustier," and "filibusterer"—in the antebellum United States.[12] In the 1850s, filibustering expeditions set out from the United States to Mexico, Nicaragua, and Ecuador, among other places, inspiring heated political debate, diplomatic exchanges, and a flurry of press coverage. Historians in both Latin America and the United States have studied in depth the diplomatic, military, and political implications of filibustering.[13] Robert May, for example, captures the contradictory responses to filibusters, who were viewed as pirates and usurpers of land but were also "worshipped as heroes by masses of people" who saw in the filibusters the romantic spirit of an age when the United States appeared destined to overtake the continent.[14] Critics of U.S. imperialism still view William Walker's expeditions to Central America as a defining moment in the sordid history of U.S. involvement in Latin America. "From then on," writes Eduardo Galeano, "invasions, interventions, bombardments, forced loans, and gun-point treaties followed one after the other."[15]

Galeano's reading of the filibuster as an Anglo-American invader of Latin America is at odds with the ways exiled Cubans conceived the filibustero. For Tolón, Villaverde, Zenea, and others, the filibustero was a symbol of exiles' determination to oust Spain from the island. While they called for the participation of the U.S. masses in the filibustering of Cuba, many Cubans identified themselves as filibusteros and presented their expeditions as examples of republican efforts to bring democracy and egalitarianism to the island. "El Filibustero" was the title of a poem and the name of a newspaper that attempted to dredge up support for filibustering expeditions to Cuba. Cuban writers believed that filibustering had both a textual and a military component; it was both a metaphor for the writer as activist and a historical movement. In turn, I deploy "filibustering" as a historically specific term that paves the way for conceiving the writers as filibusteros trying to take control of land. I use the term "filibustero newspapers" to refer to a handful of papers that overtly advocated support of filibustering expeditions, including El Filibustero, La Verdad, and the papers published by Tolón. Other papers published by Cubans during this period had more ambivalent positions toward filibustering, and still others outright rejected the U.S. annexation of Cuba.

My argument is not that Cuban filibusteros stepped outside of the ideological implications of filibustering as a U.S.-based movement. Most filibusteros compromised on the question of slavery in Cuba's future in an effort to build a military movement. Rather, I emphasize that the Cuban filibustero embodied the contradiction of protonationalist (Cuban) discourse and U.S. expansionism. In other words, the antimonarchical position of exiles was intertwined with the position of U.S. expansionists who relished the thought of roping Cuba into the Union. Why did some Cuban writers accept annexation as an option in the island's future? Historian Gerald Poyo argues that annexation was a calculated antinationalist solution based on economic and political necessities. Some of the exiles were slave owners who sought to protect their economic interests by having Cuba join the Union as a slave state. Exiles also believed that if Cuba became a U.S. state, it would not face the political upheavals that had shaken many independent Latin American nations.[16] As I show in chapter 2, annexation as an option for Cuba's future clashed with a sense among exiles that the people of Cuba and the island itself formed a distinct place with democratic rights. A careful reading of filibustero newspapers shows that for writers, a disjunction emerged between the hemispheric ambitions of the U.S. government and what filibustero writers believed America as a hemisphere meant for liberation movements. In other words, writers were inspired by America's promise of equality and freedom even as the United States instituted expansionistic military and economic practices at the expense of self-determination for indigenous and Latin American populations in the Americas. To reconcile the contradictions of opposing one empire while lining up behind another, Cuban exiles argued that Cuba's economy and public institutions would benefit from annexation.

The development of newspaper publication by Cubans in the United States can be traced back to a long-standing two-way flow of economic, political, and cultural exchange between the United States and the island. U.S. travelers and investors made their way to Cuba, and the island's intellectual and economic elite reciprocated in kind. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the U.S. became a major buyer of Cuban sugar and coffee as well as a provider of imports for the island. Investors from the United States in 1828 founded Cárdenas, which due to its demographic makeup became known as the "American city." Ten years later, engineers from the United States completed a fifty-one-mile railway between Havana and Güines, and locomotives as well as sugar machinery soon were among the U.S. imports flowing into Cuba. In 1826, U.S. vessels accounted for 783 of the 964 ships that visited the port of Havana. Meanwhile, Spanish economic participation on the island was diminishing.[17]

The economic exchange was intertwined with the U.S. government's desire for greater control over the island. As Louis Pérez notes, "North American designs on Cuba became a fixed feature of U.S. strategic objectives early in the nineteenth century."[18] Cuba presented a special set of conditions for U.S. foreign policy. Because it did not follow other Latin American countries in liberating itself from Spain in the 1820s, the island stood out as an anachronism, a territory out of sync with the twilight of colonialism in the Americas. Unlike other Latin American countries, Cuba did not abolish slavery early in the century, which placed it in a special parallel relation to the United States. Furthermore, the island's geographic position just south of Florida and jutting into the Gulf of Mexico drew the geopolitical interests of U.S. leaders. Considering Cuba's possible entry into the Union, Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Monroe in 1823, "I candidly confess, that I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of states."[19] By the 1840s, U.S. expansionists saw Cuba as a prize waiting to be taken. The United States had doubled in size in less than five years, having annexed Texas in 1845, acquired Oregon in 1846, and taken a portion of Mexico through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. In the view of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, Cuba was the next logical step following the U.S.-Mexico War: "The hardy character and indomitable enterprise manifested by the Americans in that war, pointed out at once the feasibility of employing a sufficient force to disenthral Cuba, and to allow, henceforth, the wealth of the island to accumulate within itself, to the enrichment of all classes."[20] By emphasizing the island's "wealth" and envisioning "enrichment," the magazine attempted to tap bilateral commercial interests. This type of desire for acquisition of the island's resources stretched all the way to the U.S. presidency; presidents James Polk (1845-49), Franklin Pierce (1853-57), and James Buchanan (1857-61) all tried to purchase the island from Spain.[21]

In conjunction with growing political and economic exchanges between Cuba and the United States, a rise in the number of travelers going in both directions fueled the development of cultural connections. In the antebellum period, Cuba became a favored destination for the "invalid trade," the business of tourism for sick people who sought to improve their health under the island sun.[22] The invalids who traveled to Cuba during the 1830s included Sophia Peabody, a Salem, Massachusetts, painter who would go on to marry Nathaniel Hawthorne. During the two years she spent on a rural coffee plantation with the goal of improving her health, Peabody wrote detailed letters, an unpublished "Cuba Journal" that provides a prime example of the cultural-economic connections that took travelers and invalids to Cuba. She went there as a result of her sister Mary's employment as a tutor for the children of a U.S. family profiting from plantation labor. (Mary Peabody Mann would go on to write a novel about Cuba, Juanita, published posthumously in 1887.) The writings by the Peabody sisters were among dozens of nineteenth-century books and articles about Cuba that ranged in style and substance from the dreamy, orientalist vision of William Henry Hurlbert's Gan-Eden; or, Pictures of Cuba (1854) to the sardonic analysis and jaded tone of Julia Ward Howe's A Trip to Cuba (1860).[23] Hurlbert, for one, portrayed the island as a "garden of delight" offering exotic scenes: "India itself offers nothing more thoroughly strange to our eyes."[24] The use of words such as "strange" and "exotic" in these writings emphasizes the relativity of viewpoint in travel pieces, which were usually written by upper-class travelers and writers from New England.

The movement of people and the accompanying textual production went in two directions. When opponents of Cuba's colonial rule were forced into exile in the early part of the century, they chose the United States as one of their main destinations. After becoming involved in a plot to overthrow the government, poet José María Heredia made his way to the northeastern United States in 1823.[25] He visited Philadelphia, Niagara Falls, and George Washington's home in Virginia and then published a volume of poems, Poesías (New York, 1825). Priest and philosopher Félix Varela also settled in the Northeast and published El Habanero (1824-26), a pamphlet-size periodical that was banned by the Spanish government. Varela is also believed to be the author of an anonymous Spanish-language novel, Jicoténcal (Philadelphia, 1826).[26] Varela remained in the United States until his death in 1853, and his contributions there as a priest and writer were recognized when he was honored on a 1997 U.S. postage stamp. While Varela and Heredia are part of an exile intellectual tradition, Cubans also made their way to the north voluntarily for education and entertainment. The elite vacationed in the United States early in the nineteenth century and sent their children to U.S. schools.[27]

In the late 1840s and 1850s, concomitant with the filibustering expeditions led by General Narciso López, Cubans began arriving in large numbers, establishing the foundations of communities, and cementing a U.S.-based culture of newspaper publication. A series of events in the 1840s, including increased repression in Cuba and growing support among elite Cubans for annexation to the United States, created conditions that prompted a large number of Cubans to leave the island for U.S. cities even as the colonial government condemned other Cubans to exile. In 1844, Spanish authorities unleashed a reign of terror in response to a failed slave uprising that came to be known as the Conspiracy of la Escalera, named after the Spanish word for "ladder" because suspected collaborators were tied to ladders and flogged. A military commission condemned 78 people to death, imprisoned 1,292 collaborators, and exiled 400, and some historians estimate that hundreds died during torture.[28] Those executed publicly included poet Gabriel de la Concepción Valdez, better known as Plácido, whom I discuss in chapter 4. Authorities also imprisoned writers, and the censor banned, among other titles, the antislavery novel Sab by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, who was living in Europe at the time.[29]

La Escalera disrupted a literary and cultural movement to establish a discourse of Cubanness that had been building since the early 1830s. Writers connected to critic and literary impresario Domingo Delmonte had published a variety of texts, including antislavery poetry and an autobiographical piece by former slave Juan Francisco Manzano. Antonio Benítez Rojo argues that this cultural outpouring represented an attempt to manipulate, even as writers were manipulated by, a discourse of Cubanness that emerged in conjunction and in response to the rapid development of the sugar plantation as a site of power.[30] This movement, as Benítez Rojo notes, had an ambivalent relationship with "foreign intellectual circles" that included not only British abolitionists but also operatives in the U.S. State Department such as Alexander Everett.[31] In turn, Manzano's poems were published in London in 1840. As a result of these connections, writers turned to other countries following the repression of La Escalera. Writing to his friend Delmonte in 1844, Villaverde described the atmosphere in Cuba as so poisoned that two men who "cultivate letters" could not meet casually to discuss literature.[32] Imprisoned four years later for plotting against the government, Villaverde escaped from jail and settled in New York, where he lived until his death in 1894. In effect, La Escalera radicalized writers such as Villaverde and prompted them to look for places where they could produce political writing.

New York and New Orleans became publishing centers for writers who saw their work as connected to annexationist plotting and filibustering. In New York, the newspaper La Verdad began appearing in January 1848 as a voice of the Cuban Council, a coalition of revolutionaries and planters from the island who saw annexation to the United States as a viable option for separating from Spain. La Verdad, as I discuss in chapter 2, brought together U.S.-based supporters of Manifest Destiny, Cuban planters who backed annexation, and patriotic writers who supported filibustering as a military option for changing conditions in Cuba. But La Verdad's support of annexation came under attack as exile circles drew writers with a variety of political positions, including abolitionists. By 1853, newspapers such as Villaverde's El Independiente called for an internal revolution on the island, deemphasizing the importance of annexation. And not long thereafter, newspapers published in the United States began challenging one another on a series of issues, including the influence of Cuba's upper class and the acceptance of slavery in Cuba's future. To understand differences among the writers, I discuss each newspaper's platform and clarify its positions in relation to the politics of filibustering, U.S. expansionism, and slavery.

Most of the writers, editors, and publishers of these newspapers hailed from Cuba's intellectual elite. As educated Creoles—whites born on the island—these writers had distinct racial advantages in Cuba's slave society. In 1846, 36 percent of Cuba's population of 898,752 was made up of slaves, and another 16 percent were free colored.[33] With most of the population having little or no opportunity for an education, to be a published writer in Cuba in the 1840s and 1850s was a remarkable privilege. Some had made their marks by publishing literary pieces in Cuba: Villaverde in fiction, Tolón and Zenea in poetry, and Betancourt Cisneros in essays. In the United States, all four became newspaper writers and editors, and Villaverde went so far as to renounce fiction for some years because he questioned the efficacy of literary genres in bringing about revolution. This study, however, does not focus only on figures whose place in Cuban literary history is tied to fiction and poetry. I include lesser-known exiles who carved out a place in the U.S. publishing scene, including Francisco Agüero Estrada, printer José Mesa, and revolutionary journalist Juan Bellido de Luna. Ambrosio José Gonzales, a military man who fought with López in Cuba, published the pamphlet Manifesto on Cuban Affairs Addressed to the People of the United States (1853); planter Cristóbal Madan, the first president of the Cuban Council, published an economic treatise, Llamamiento de la Isla de Cuba a la Nación Española (An address from the island of Cuba to the Spanish nation) (1854).

Most of the newspapers' writers were men, and thus gender conventions and the development of revolutionary masculinity influenced their perspectives on filibustering and Cuba. To highlight the importance of gender to exile writing, I focus on the differences between the filibusteros and some of Cuba's major women poets who remained on the island or went to Europe. At the same time, I analyze the writing of Emilia Casanova de Villaverde, whose arrival in the United States during the filibustering fifties prompted a political development that culminated in her work as an activist during the 1860s and 1870s. My focus on a woman whose revolutionary writing work is slightly outside the period of this study is an attempt to question the marginal place of women in the newspapers and to shed a critical light on how textual production and activism were intertwined with masculinity. Vera Kutzinski argues that a self-effacement of masculinity in Cuban and other "Hispanic-American cultures" functions simultaneously with "an erasure of the female subject from critical discourses."[34] I attempt not only to critique this tendency but also to resist it by discussing women's writings, and I explore how masculine definitions of the filibustero were constituted historically in relation to writers' anxieties about their power (or lack thereof) in Cuban and U.S. societies.

In exile, many writers experienced contradictory social and class locations as the intellectual privilege they brought from Cuba and the political connections they developed in the United States clashed with the experience of poverty and U.S. racism. Many of the writers worked as language tutors and struggled to find money for their publications. While La Verdad was kept afloat by steady funding from Cuban planters who supported annexation, writers struggled to put out issues of fledgling publications. Mesa, for example, took a loss when he ventured to print and/or edit three independent newspapers. In the final issue of his El Eco de Cuba, Mesa told readers that working on newspapers had not brought him a single cent of profit. "On the contrary," he wrote, "they have been a burden on the pocket, in addition to taking up personal and work time."[35] Despite the economic challenges of putting out newspapers while trying to get by in a new country, Cubans developed connections in the highest circles of the U.S. government. Betancourt Cisneros and Jose Aniceto Iznaga, both of whom worked on La Verdad, met with President Polk in 1848, escorted to the White House by Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi.[36] During the height of enthusiasm for filibustering Cuba, exiles met with Robert E. Lee, Stephen Douglas, and Pierre Soulé. Some of these interactions were facilitated by the political operative who was closest to the exiles, John L. O'Sullivan, newspaper editor and prophet of Manifest Destiny. O'Sullivan, who was Critóbal Madan's brother-in-law, shared Cubans' belief in the connection between military filibustering and newspapers and helped organize filibustering expeditions.

The cultural, political, and economic connections that emerged in conjunction with the Cuban filibustering expeditions call attention to the depth and variety of Cuban exile experiences during the past two hundred years. Writers often referred to themselves as cubanos, but that self-identification as Cubans was not transparent; their desire to become Cuban in a governmentally sanctioned sense was heightened by the distance from home. Their publications attempted to connect "Cuban" identity with revolution and opposition to Spain. By bringing forth the way writers in exile articulate the nation as a desired ideal and a territorial reality, both present and absent from their immediate context, I challenge the belief that the nation is solely a local formation. At the same time, I emphasize that the nation was an important part of textual production and self-identification for Cuban exiles in the nineteenth century. Neither something to celebrate nor something to dismiss, the nation is the engine driving the distasteful alliances that developed in the mid-nineteenth century: filibustering brought together slaveholders in Cuba and the United States, northern U.S. expansionists, and soldiers of fortune. For some in that coalition, the nation (United States) provided a racist justification for the takeover of land. For other supporters of filibustering, the nation (Cuba) was the object of a desire that justified a compromise on the question of slavery.

More than a political end, Cuba was also a lost object for writers who mourned their distance from the island. Writers' references to Cuba were often intertwined with grief over distance from their relatives and a utopian desire for a future community based on equality. As Edward Said argues, exile can bring difficulty and opportunity simultaneously: "Exile is one of the saddest fates," Said writes in Representations of the Intellectual, describing a "median state" in which a person can neither fully integrate into the new setting nor let go of the old, "beset with half-involvements and half-detachments, nostalgic and sentimental on one level, an adept mimic or a secret outcast on another."[37] In Culture and Imperialism, Said points to another dimension of exile when describing his own experience: "belonging, as it were, to both sides of the imperial divide enables you to understand them more easily."[38] Exile, then, is an incomplete and unstable position, but it presents possibilities for individual and collective change. I use the phrase "Cuban exiles in the United States" because it emphasizes displacement and a shift in location. The writers in this study called themselves desterrados, deterritorialized people whose life experiences were intimately connected and disconnected to more than one country. While a common translation for desterrado is exile, the Spanish word has lexical and connotative dimensions that are not captured by the English. Desterrado emphasizes a tearing away from the land; thus, to be a Cuban desterrado destabilizes the association of territory and nation that has marked many of the seminal texts defining Cubanness. But the condition of exile created a longing for the connection to nation-territory; as a result, contemporary concepts that deemphasize the nation, such as borderlands, do not correspond to the historical vision of Cuban desterrados.[39] In turn, I have avoided contemporary ethnic labels, such as "Cuban American," that imply a more fluid sense of self and nation.[40]

To read these as writers solely of Cuba or solely as part of a U.S. tradition is to miss the multiple locations of writings that crossed languages, national borders, and sociocultural contexts. My goal is to recover the U.S. context of publication without integrating these texts solely into a narrative of U.S. traditions. Writing to Cuba is inspired by recent efforts in U.S. literary and cultural studies to examine the relationship of culture to U.S. imperialism by considering questions of nation formation vis-à-vis othered peoples and hemispheric debates over race and slavery, among other topics.[41] In some cases, moving beyond the nation can lead to incisive readings of how U.S.-based authors construct foreignness and both replicate and challenge cultural imperialism. A turn toward the analysis of imperialism in American studies, exemplified in the collection Cultures of United States Imperialism, emerged almost simultaneously with a scholarly project to recover and contextualize a history of writings by people of Latin American descent in the United States.[42] As Nicolás Kanellos notes, "Historically, the diverse ethnic groups that we conveniently lump together as 'Hispanics' or 'Latinos' created a literature even before the founding of the United States."[43] In response, Kanellos has led a monumental effort to gather and disseminate materials, making available through the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage series numerous primary sources and critical studies that have called attention to a long history of publishing by people of Spanish and Latin American descent in North America.[44] In addition, scholars have published impressive studies of newspapers in the Southwest.[45] Notable recent books include Kirsten Silva Gruesz's far-ranging comparative study of cultural exchanges in the nineteenth-century United States. Calling "for a strong revision of literary-historical narratives of the U.S. national tradition that render the Latino presence ghostly and peripheral," Gruesz recaptures the ways in which writers of Latin American descent interacted with Anglo Americans and responded to a variety of social and political conflicts of the period.[46] Gruesz's reading of the past through the lens of Latino studies is likely to inspire other studies that employ a panethnic or multinational analysis. While the work of exiled Cuban writers is part of a broader history that could be retroactively read in panethnic terms, I emphasize the U.S.-Cuba connection to bring forth specificity in the political positions of writings and in the conditions of print culture. Whatever their sense of kinship with other Latin Americans, the writers in this study placed Cuba at the center of their texts.

Recovery work in the nineteenth century necessarily entails a tension between the particular conditions and affiliations of writers (in this case Cuban exiles) and the goals of contemporary analytical frameworks labeled Chicano/a, Latino/a, or Hispanic. As José Aranda shows, recovery work can bring forth heterogeneity in terms of class and political positions for groups that might otherwise be read as sharing a common social marginalization across centuries. Discussing the relationship of Chicano/a studies to writer María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Aranda calls "for moving scholarship beyond counter-nationalist arguments that conceive Chicano/a culture and history in strict opposition to U.S. and Western cultures." Aranda insists "on the need to formulate histories and analyses that place some people of Mexican descent at the center of discourses more typically associated with Anglo America."[47] That type of discursive commonality is exemplified by the enthusiasm for annexation in some writings by Cuban exiles.

Writing to Cuba elucidates how exiles' texts displayed both Cuban protonationalism and the connections to Anglo-American expansionist politics and culture. With filibustering and the attendant politics of annexation at the center of textual production for exiles in the late 1840s and 1850s, both the United States and Cuba figure prominently in the writings considered here. I emphasize that recovery work, when considering publications by exiles and immigrants, needs to be attentive to the political arenas in writers' home countries as well as the United States. In U.S. cities throughout the nineteenth century, writers from Latin America took up periodical production to influence political opinion in their home countries.[48] As such, Writing to Cuba adopts a transnational approach that considers how writings relate to historical contingencies in more than one country. I seek to analyze how writings are influenced by and respond to more than one context. My use of "transnational" draws from the sociological examination of migrants whose economic, social, and cultural affiliations move from one country to another. In the contemporary period, for example, some workers who live in the United States retain families, political allegiances, and religious ties to their countries of origin.[49] Economic conditions, juridical relationships, and everyday experiences are not contained within national borders for people who can travel (with varying degrees of difficulty) from one place to another and back. Because present-day transnational studies tend to emphasize the interrelationship of commodity production and global capitalism, such studies usually focus on an economic subject, especially when that person is conceived as a migrant. John Carlos Rowe argues that contemporary transnational approaches have a tendency to separate new global trends from their histories, but he also warns against projecting terms such as "postcolonial" and "transnational," framed in the current crisis of capitalist exploitation, "too unilaterally onto the related but different histories that have given rise to such circumstances."[50] My use of "transnational," then, is specific to the notion of writing to Cuba from the United States, a process that takes into account audiences in an expanding nation-state and a colony where protonational sentiments circulated. I emphasize writing in its various forms as my primary object of study and thus use the term "transnational writing."

Transnational writing moved from the United States to Cuba and back as it went through the stages of composition, publication, and circulation. In other words, the texts were transnational not only in content but also in their production and dissemination. Print culture historian Robert Darnton uses the term "communications circuit" to describe a cycle that moves "from the author to the publisher (if the bookseller does not assume that role), the printer, the shipper, the bookseller, and the reader."[51] It is a cycle because the writer is also a reader. Darnton's model opens avenues for considering various manifestations of print, particularly newspapers and pamphlets, which are lighter than books and thus can be transported more easily from one nation to another. If the communications circuit through which transnational writing moves in the Americas were mapped, different parts of the cycle would exist in different countries. An article written in Cuba might be published in New York and read by someone in New Orleans. Or a poem that appears in New York might make its way aboard a ship sailing for Havana. This flow is not easy, and one of the challenges that Cuban exiles faced was how to move their texts through a transnational circuit that could be ruptured at various points.

The belief that texts printed in the United States could circulate in Cuba—the conceptual basis of transnational writing—came into conflict with the real impediments of how to transport the documents and make them available in a society where such texts were banned. The difficulties of circulating transnational writing hindered the revolutionary efficacy of publications. In the 1850s, texts did not circulate widely enough to prompt a revolution; the communications circuit was ruptured by censorship in Cuba and splintered by the multiple reading sites of transnational writing. Cuban exiles showed themselves to be more hopeful than realistic about the effects of both filibustering expeditions and their filibustero newspapers. As I subsequently discuss in more detail, efforts to filibuster Cuba both militarily and through writing failed to draw enough support from populations in Cuba and the United States to end Spanish rule.

Chapter 1, "El Filibustero: Symbol of the Battle for Cuba," establishes the conceptual premise for discussing transnational writing as a form of filibustering. I begin by providing an overview of the filibuster as a mid-nineteenth-century figure who embodied contradictions inherent in the U.S. mission to spread American, in the broader sense, republicanism throughout the hemisphere. Focusing on the newspaper El Filibustero and poems that appeared in transnational newspapers, I show how the filibustero as both a fighter and a symbol is important to understanding the connection between newspapers and other forms of writings by Cuban exiles, including poetry. I show that writers attempted to wage a war of words. I conclude the chapter by highlighting the irony of using the filibustero (which by definition does not have a territory) for an anticolonial battle and raise questions about writers' assumptions that they could take over the island and change governmental structures in Cuba by printing newspapers.

Chapter 2, "Annexation and Independence: Newspaper Wars and Transnational Cuba," provides an overview of the variety of newspapers, their connections to Cuban cultural contexts, and their adoption of U.S. print culture conditions. Through an analysis of La Verdad, I show how writers negotiated the politically loaded question of annexation and debated issues that concerned exile communities in New York and New Orleans. Although most exiles adopted a proannexation position, notions of "independence" circulated freely in the newspapers as writers conceived of the island as a separate territory from Spain. A reading of newspapers shows a dialogic process that led ultimately to a budding sense of Cuba as a distinct place and culture with its own people.

Chapter 3, "Men of Action: Revolutionary Masculinity and Women Writers," argues that men in exile developed a male-centered notion of a revolutionary fighter in part out of anxiety about how effective a man of letters could be in removing Spanish colonial rule from Cuba. In the wake of the death of filibustero Narciso López, writers promoted the notion that "men of action" would have to take over Cuba. In turn, these writers published a stream of poems valorizing General López as the ultimate revolutionary fighter. Given the gendered dimensions of the "man of action," I turn to Miguel T. Tolón's efforts to build a revolutionary movement that included women and compare poems by U.S.-based male writers to some of Cuba's women writers from the period. I then show that the ultimate woman of action was Emilia Casanova de Villaverde, a political activist who gained prominence in the late 1860s. Reading Casanova's letters to various leaders in the Americas, I argue that she came to embody the revolutionary agency sought by filibusteros in the 1850s.

Chapter 4, "El Mulato: Race, Land, and Labor in the Americas," focuses on the newspaper El Mulato, which ignited a debate over abolition among exiles. Looking at the way antebellum U.S. culture promoted a notion that filibustering and territorial rights were tied to race, I show that Cuban writers promoted a construction of island identity tied to a white Creole (criollo). But that construction prompted a handful of Cuban abolitionists to challenge the proslavery position; consequently, a different kind of man of action, mulatto writer Plácido, emerged in both Cuban and U.S. letters as a new revolutionary martyr for the cause of abolition and racial equality. I conclude the chapter with a reading of El Negro Mártir, an anonymous serialized novella published in El Mulato.

Chapter 5, "A Filibustero's Novel: Cecilia Valdés and a Memory of Nation," brings together the various issues presented in the previous chapters—filibustering, the man of action, gendered conceptions of Cuba, and debates about slavery—by considering the transnational dimensions of one of Cuba's canonical nineteenth-century novels. I read Villaverde's Cecilia Valdés o La Loma del Angel (New York, 1882) as an attempt to seize the territory of the Cuban nation when it appears that the military battle for the island has been lost. By considering Villaverde's work as a filibustero and newspaper writer in the United States, I show that a novel that has been widely read as "Cuban" was the result of the transnational print culture that Villaverde helped develop as a writer in exile. The epilogue considers the work of José Martí in relation to filibusteros and argues that although filibustering failed militarily, it led to the development of a Cuban print culture in exile that had great influence in the latter part of the century.

My discussion of Villaverde, Zenea, and other writers as part of the United States as well as Cuba is an attempt to remap the contours of literary history, to pull out of the nation-state's limits without negating the historical importance of the nation. Writing to Cuba points to the importance of understanding the dual or multiple historical and cultural contexts of writers who go into exile or migrate to the United States from other parts of the world. This study also calls on critics of U.S. literature and culture to consider the ways writers who might be categorized as ethnic or, more specifically, Latino/a, retain connections to their countries of origin or, in some cases, the countries of their ancestors. The condition of movement entails that writers respond to social and political contexts in more than one country; thus, the labels of nation and ethnicity should serve more as provisional organizational principles than as descriptive or defining categories. "No one today is purely one thing," writes Said. "Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind."[52] What are those other things that make up a person, and how do they appear at particular moments in history? If writers are defined and define themselves in part by what they write, then what happens when their texts move beyond the starting points that might otherwise connect a person to one place or ethnic identity? To explore this question for Cuban exiles in the mid-nineteenth century, the first chapter focuses on the filibuster(o).