Lisandro Perez, “Sugar, Cigars and Revolution: The Making of Cuban New York” (NYU Press, 2018)

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We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the new Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that to love the forum and we can talk. Welcome to the new Books Network. Hi, this is Beth Harpaz, guest hosting a new series for the new Books Network, presented by the Gotham Center for New York City History at CUNY, the City University of New York. Today, I'll be speaking with Lissandro Perez, professor at John J. College, which is part of CUNY. He is the author of a new book called Sugar, Sigars, and Revolution, the Making of Cuban New York. The book reveals an incredible slice of Cuban American history that unfolded not in Miami, but right here in New York City. Professor Perez is a sociologist in the Department of Latin American and Latino Latina Studies at John J. College. And my role in all of this is as the editor of a CUNY website called SUM, SUM, where we showcase scholarship by CUNY faculty, including books like Sugar, Sigars, and Revolution. Welcome, professor Perez. It's great to speak with you. Thank you for inviting me to a new book with history. So I have lived in New York City all my life. I've been to Cuba. I've been to Miami. And other than eating Cuban food in New York, actually Cuban Chinese food, and we'll get to the origins of that a little later, I've never really given any thought to there being much of a Cuban presence in New York City. And maybe showing my age, I do remember the old "I Love Lucy" show when I was a kid. Her husband Desi Arnez was Cuban. They lived in New York City. But other than that, Cubans in New York, I mean, today in 2018, the history of that community is pretty invisible. And yet you say in your book that New York was the most important city for Cubans in the US until 1960. So let's start maybe by just summing up for listeners. What went on in New York that made it such an important place in Cuban American history. What was the big picture? Well, it was the largest community of Cubans in the United States, by far, until Ibor City opened in 1886. And then it remained. It began its primacy again in the 1920s and remains until 1960 when Miami, of course, took over with the new immigrants from post-revolution Cuba. But New York in the 19th century was not only the most important city for Cubans, there was also the largest, Cubans in New York, where the largest group of Latin Americans in New York City. And it was also the largest community of Latin Americans in the United States, east of the Mississippi. So I was a little bit surprised when I really started reading into that history that there was really so little that was known of it. We knew a bit about its political activism, but as a sociologist, I wanted to do no more about that community. And so that's why I undertake this book. All right. Let's drill down a little to the details and go back to where you start your book. The year is 1823. New York is a thriving port city. It's already a global center of finance. And in that year, 1823, 97 ships arrive in New York from Cuba. 97. That's a lot. Why? What were they bringing here? Why was there so much commerce and traffic between Cuba and New York in the early 19th century? And the origins of that traffic actually go back, even much further, 1923. It goes back to even before the American Revolution. The British took over Havana in 1762 and occupied it for 11 months and that opened up traffic with the British North American colonies. And at that time, Cuba didn't have a lot to sell, but the traffic was, the traffic and ship was already initiated, and what eventually Cuba did sell in large amounts was sugar. There was a sugar revolution in Cuba, by which many of what became the aristocracy, the sugarocracy is one historian calls it in Cuba, purchased large amounts of land and started producing sugar for the world market. And it was the principle market for that sugar. New York had the largest number of refineries anywhere in the U.S. and there were these mercantile agents in New York City that acted as commission agents. They would receive the sugar from the growers and the planters in Cuba and sell it for them to the refineries in New York and that established a very, very intense ship traffic that eventually included not only bringing into New York cigars and tobacco, but then also sending to Cuba manufactured goods that the new sugarocracy wanted to buy. Now you actually talk a lot in the book about this, you call them the sugarocracy here and on a conversation, the landed gentry of Cuba putting down these roots in New York City. These were the aristocrats who made their fortunes as you say in the sugar trade and we want to be sure to point out that Cuba was one of the last countries to abolish slavery. So if you're making your money off of sugar plantation in Cuba, you're making your money off of slave labor. And so these plantation owners, they're sending their children to school in New York, they're buying New York real estate. They live a very fancy life on their visits here on the time they spend in New York, tell us a little bit about that. Well, when they sold their sugar here in New York, they had accounts with these emerging townhouses, they were called counting houses in New Orleans, hadn't they most prominent then was Moses Taylor and Company and by the way there's a very large archive of the Moses Taylor papers documenting all of this in the New York Public Library and through that traffic we see how these landowners in Cuba who sold their sugar in New York maintain these very large accounts, they didn't want their money in Cuba, their liquid asset to Cuba, they wanted them in New York and these county houses manage this money for them, making investments but also buying things for them, things that they need a machinery, they need it for their sugar mills, carriages to ride around in Havana, linen, silverware just about any day and also they received the children of many of these landowners who wanted their children educated in the West, increasingly because of this traffic and because they were selling in New York, New York became, I argue, in the book, this sort of place where Cubans were the reference point for Cubans, it was kind of in the Cuban consciousness that other place and they traveled extensively to New York, they said their children to be educated in boarding schools in the Hudson Valley and in New Jersey, the county houses manage all of this for them and so there was this traffic that occurred throughout the first half, particularly of the 19th century, there was an estimate that there had been already by the middle of the 19th century, about 2,000 Cuban children, Cuban young men who had been educated in the United States and most of those were in New York, so there was this traffic and New York became the sort of place of reference for this elite, for this Havana base to be in Cuba. You also talk in the book about other social classes of Cubans who made their way to New York, Afro Cubans, Chinese Cubans, working class Cubans, give us a sliver of insight into each of those demographics and you mentioned the cigar trade earlier because long before Ibor City and Tampa, there were Cuban cigar makers in New York City, tell us a little bit about those cohorts, those sectors. Well, what we call Havana, what we call Havana, Fanaque clear tobacco leaves and that was a title that was given to New York, became very desirable in New York. There was already a large cigar manufacturing industry in New York, largely established by German immigrants and cigar leaves started being imported from Cuba early and in the 19th century, well, about 1840, 1550, 1560s or so, later that was called by Cuban cigar workers per se. Most of those initially were white, but by the 1870, there's an increasing number of Afro Cubans cigar workers. And so let me just interrupt you for a second, were those, so those were, had they been slaves likely at one time and they earned their freedom at some point or how did slavery figure into that Afro Cuban demographic in New York? Many of them had been free cigar workers in Cuba. Some of them had, those that had become cigar workers when they came to New York. It's also important to keep in mind that that lack that aristocracy that came to New York and they came in large numbers starting in about 1869, 1870 because the war broke out in Cuba. Those that came brought their house slaves with them and that was the, many ways, the beginning, the early beginnings of an Afro Cuban community in New York when these laborers, and I can see them in the sense of schedules that they have persons born in Cuba who are black and who are domestic servants living in their hustles. Many of those became emancipated themselves of course in New York after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery in New York and in the United States. And so they essentially went into other trades of which cigar was one of them. There were also Chinese Cubans, for example. The Chinese were taking the Cuba to replace a lot of African slave labor as indentured servants and Cuban law actually Spanish law dictated that once those arrangers are over there was supposed to lead Cuba. Well, the ships that the quickership you could get on in Havana was going to New York because of that traffic. And you actually see the ship manifest of Chinese Cubans arriving in New York City. And they became part of some of them might have left again to China, but some of them became part of the Chinese community in New York City. Wow. I mean, that's just it's fascinating stuff. And one of the things that I loved about your book, you know, you are a sociologist. You did an incredible amount of research coming through the census rolls from every decade in the 19th century and giving us such great details about where people lived, what their households were consisting of, you know, their race. And it's so cool how that information that you gleaned from the census tells these stories to us. I attended a few weeks ago a reading that you did, Professor Perez, a little book talk here at the Graduate Center of City University of New York. And you talked a little bit about the research you did at the New York Public Library. Could you just describe that for us because people may not be aware of, you know, that the richness of that archive and how it speaks to us, you know, a century later. Well, I'm a sociologist. So my approach to this topic, unlike perhaps historian, was not to start with the archives, which I eventually did use was not to start with, say, the newspapers that they had published. And there's been some studies of the newspapers and the political activism of the community. My instinct was to start with the census. I wanted to get a complete picture of the community as a sociologist. And so many of these genealogical research tools that are available online, such as ancestries, for example, are very powerful tools for this because although most people search on these other ancestries, you could search on these by, for example, place of birth and get all of the census forms. And by that I mean the question here is not the statistics, but the actual forms that were filled out when an enumerator went to people's houses and jotted down who lived there, the characteristics and so forth. And so I have actually been able to print out from that source and others the census forms for all persons born in Cuba who were enumerated by the U.S. federal census in New York City between 1815 and 1880. And of course that paint such tremendous picture tells you where they lived. It tells you what their occupations were, it tells you about their race, it tells you about household arrangements. You can find, for example, a lot of neighborhoods that were created by Cubans. And so as a sociologist, I didn't want to deal with this Cuban community if I sort of, you know, just political activists who wrote things. I wanted to put this feet on the ground essentially on the sidewalk of New York and where they lived. And that was actually interesting because there were several things that came out of that that were illustrative of that history and not looking at that community as a physical kind of, you know, entity, not just a set of relationships, but as a physical on the ground entity. And what was like the peak year and what was the number, what was the most number of Cubans that lived in New York City and in what year? And what were some of the neighborhoods where you found concentrations of Cuban Americans or Cuban emigres? Well, the high water mark in the 19th century is the census of 1870. And the reason for that is that in 1868, October, that war breaks out in Cuba, actually led not by the elite in Havana, the Cuban elites in Havana, but by the Easterners. The, that sugar accuracy, those elites in the West, in Havana, saw themselves forced to leave because they were either had to be loyal to Spain or essentially be persecuted, so they left. They left in their large numbers and I have a chapter in my book that documents that exit ourselves the most prominent Cuban by this time, I mean Cuban in the sense that they're already second, third generation Cubans, they do not have an identification of Spanish. They find themselves persecuted by this new wave of repression that the Spanish unleashed and they left. And so 1870 is the high water mark. And again, they left many of them left with their house slaves, eventually during the 1870s, the community grew, but that high water mark from the census of 1870. And I found about 3,000 persons born in Cuba that lived in the five boroughs, what would then go with what are now the five boroughs of New York City. And that's a fairly high number because it doesn't include, for example, their children who were born in the US, it doesn't include a lot of people who also identified as being Spanish after all Cuba is not a political entity, they don't, they have a Spanish passport. And there were some who said when they asked where were you born, they said it's Spain because they considered Cuba part of Spain. So that's 3,000, even 3,000, in 1870, which I think is a significant number, what still is still an undercount. The richer people, the richer people lived where rich people lived in Manhattan, a lot of them lived in the Madison Square Park area. The working class, especially when Lee, the guard workers came in, worked in, were working class areas with what are now so, I try Becca, the West Village in that area. But a lot of the Afro-Cuba's, of course, who came as slaves and were domestic servants lived with, of course, their employers, so to speak, in these fashionable neighborhoods. Yeah, and as a New Yorker, it was something really thrilling about reading, you know, you give the exact addresses where various individuals lived. And it was very exciting to see an address where someone lived in the 1800s and it's West 27th Street. Okay, I know what West 27th Street looks like, and I know class in Avenue in Brooklyn, which is where the Great Jose Martí lived in a boarding house. Let's talk about Jose Martí, the great Cuban hero, the great poet, surely everyone listening to this podcast knows the beautiful Song Guantanamera, which was inspired by a Martí poem. And Martí, of course, devoted his life to the cause of liberating Cuba from Spain. Cuba was a Spanish colony, and you write that Martí himself was imprisoned by the Spaniards when he was a teenager in Cuba for his political activity. He then was sent to Spain, eventually he made his way to New York. To say in the book that he spent most of his adult life in New York City, that is simply astonishing on the face of it. I mean, you know, you talk about Jose Martí, and then if you were to say to someone, oh yes, and he lived most of his life in New York City, people would be like, what? So why did he spend most of his time in New York? What was he doing here? Well, he arrived in in 1880, January 1880, then he left for several months away as well by October 1880, he was back here, and then he lived in an uninterrupted fashion, patchy. We don't have a lot of record of him leaving the New York, the Tri-State area, let's say until about 1891 or 1892, and he left definitively, told Cuba where he was killed in February, in January of 1895, so if you look at that, that's between 1881, 1881 to 1895. This is a man who died when he was 42 years old. So the bulk of his adult life by far was spent in New York, and he was in New York because it was the closest place to Cuba, in other words, the ship traffic, everything. You could put a letter in the mail and have it arrive in Cuba because there was a ferry soon, because there was a ship leaving practically every day, because of this commerce. It was also the place where modernity was being exercised on a large scale in the world, and patterns of urban modernity, and Marty made a living writing a great deal about what he saw in New York, and whether in New York, and by extension of the United States, some new patterns of modernity, were really what was needed for Latin America, and specifically for the nation that he was trying to build, which was the Cuban nation. So New York was a logical place for him. I think Key West might have been closer, but Key West was a smaller community. I think the intellectual and political and everything weight of New York was something that Marty found very attractive, and besides the enjoyed New Yorker's great deal, I have a lot of, you know, his chronicles talking about going to the Domonica and going to Barnum's and so forth. So he was never an American in the sense of EUF, never identified with the US, but he was in New Yorker, which is even today, we think being in New Yorker is kind of a global sort of identification, not just the US identification. And I think that he was from there, of course, that he launched his definitive independence movement. Right. There was certainly a lot of political activism going on, you know, Jose Marti and many other Cubans who lived in New York. You write about the newspapers and the meetings and all that. One funny little side note here, you know, some New Yorkers may know that there is a statue of Jose Marti at the, one of the entrances to Central Park on 59th Street. I think it's around 6th Avenue and you, you told me Professor Perez that you recently went to an unveiling of a copy of this very statue in Havana. Jose Marti is on horseback in this sculpture and he has a very anguished look on his face. Surely Jose Marti was not riding horses around New York City during the years he lived here. You, you told me a funny story about this statue, let's, let's recount it here. Well, that story, that story is actually a very recent date because just in January of this year, as you indicated, a replica and a complete replica down the little size and even the pedestal of it was inaugurated in Havana. And, and it's a very strange statue of Marti because it's actually aesthetically very dynamic and it shows the moment in which he's hit by bullets by the Spanish and he's falling off the horse. If you don't know the backstory, you're wondering what's going on within this horse and his horse has a sort of wild look on it and say, it was a sculpture done by in Huntington who was a woman who had quite a bit of money herself and she was a very good sculptor and she and she did horses, that's what she did and she donated that statue and the 1950s to the city of New York. But of course, or, Marti had to be on a horse because Huntington did horses and we know and we know that we do know that the one time Marti was in horses when he was killed and so she depicts that moment. It's strange because he's in a suit as if he just, you know, was walking along New York. We know he wasn't in a suit in the countryside in Cuba when he was there with Cuban forces, when he had joined the Cuban forces that he helped to organize. So he's shown in that sort of strange way. It's not a statue that's actually aesthetic, it's a very good, it's a central part that's in a very constrained space and there's no perspective on it. I never thought it was a good idea to do a replica, it cost a lot of money and I don't think that Cuban eats another statue of Marti, other plenty of it. But you know, when I went to the inauguration in January, it really looks good in the environment, it's sort of an esplomated, it has perspective, it looks very grand, it looks even better there. And in Central Park, and I think the historian of the city of Havana, oh, by the way, I've taken on tours of New York, Cuban landmarks in New York City, the historian of the city of Havana has to be credited for the effort to do that replica. All right, and another individual whom you write about in the book, I want to mention in our talk is Father Felix Varela, a Cuban priest. He arrives in 1823, that's the year you start your historical account. Tell us a little bit about Father Varela's life, why was he so important in the history of New York City? Well, he's another one who decided that although he didn't like the English language and he didn't like the cold of New York City, had to stay in New York and he stayed there from the time he arrived in December of 1823, all the way to 1849, and after that, he has poor health, he goes to St. Augustine Florida where he dies a couple of years after that. He was a very important figure, and he's one of the overlooked figures in New York history, because you could say that Martin was more involved with his independent efforts, but it actually made important contributions in New York City, specifically to the Archdiocese of New York. In fact, he was considered one time to be bishop of New York City, he came at a time of course in which there was a lot of great deal of what was called anti-papers sentiment and anti-immigrant sentiment, and he became a sort of protector of the Irish. He had no alternative but to stay in New York, he didn't want to return to Cuba, but there was a death sentence hanging over him, in fact a death sentence that Spanish authorities wanted to put into effect in New York, because they actually sent an assassin to New York City to kill him, but he was sort of flushed out by the Irish parishioners, his Irish parishioners. He is, there are two churches currently in New York that have plots in front indicating that indeed, but they have found that these parishes, one is the church of the Transfiguration of Maat Street in Chinatown, and the other one is St. James, at St. James's place, both of those have plots that testify, that document about a left contribution to the city. That's just fascinating. You mentioned a little earlier in our talk that New York was a sort of a modernist city in the 19th century, and one of the aspects of your book, you described the way in which you believe New York helped shape Cuban identity. I think you make a very convincing case that Cuban intellectuals and activists and aristocrats having been exposed to the culture and the daily life of this kind of, you know, modern New York, that they kind of rejected the old world European sensibilities of Spain, and they very intentionally embraced, you know, what you call this modernist identity. Can you talk a little bit about that, and maybe give us an example or two of how that modernist identity manifested itself in Cuban culture in Cuba? Even the slave owners had an orientation of sort of wanting to be modern. They, for example, kept up on all the chemical advances in science that would help them to better granulate and process sugar. They immediately applied a steam-driven, theme-driven grinders in their mills. All of these they'd bought from the U.S., they saw the U.S. as this model of progress of technological advance. There were scientific societies founded by these planters in Havana to advance precisely the application of science to sort of economic models of change, and it was a really interesting orientation. Spain, which of course, was sort of mirrored in traditional patterns of, you know, both the religiosity and so forth, was not that model. Increasingly, Cubans looked to the United States as being that model. They were poets that came and talked about all this new bridge across Niagara Falls. They did that as a suspension bridge and so there was this sort of model. And I think the most evident manifestation that later on in the 19th century is baseball. You don't hear anything about Cubans ever associated with bullfighting, but there was bullfighting, of course, in Cuba, in the early colonial base. And there was a latter part of the 19th century through the U.S. connection, through Fordham University. In fact, you start getting baseball players in Cuba, you start having Cubans going to the United States playing baseball in the United States and going back. Well, by the 1880s and so the competition for the public arenas in Havana and in other cities in Cuba started favoring baseball, not bullfighting. Bullfighting is literally raced and it was symbolic of the fact that a lot of these traditional patterns that Spain meant to Cuba were being raced in favor of these new American ways, which included baseball. The first magazine, one of the first magazines I think you about baseball is called baseball and modernity. That was the actual title of it. And baseball was seen as a modern game and eventually it won out and we know Cubans, of course, became great baseball fans and great baseball players as a result of that and that's one manifestation of that. Another thing I might add on that is at my pee. We now look at some of his chronicles on immigration to New York and, you know, the cutting in the Lower East Side with some, you know, we look at it and say, he was kind of a modern sort of guy, but he actually was a little bit suspicious of this immigration because he felt that all of these European immigrants coming into New York and into the United States were bringing with them traditional patterns, you know, that might undermine this progressive American Republic that had been established by these enlightened men, right? So he was a little bit of an anti-immigrant by being an immigrant himself, but he was just very, very concerned about European influences in America. So yeah, baseball versus bullfighting and the fact that baseball won out in Cuba partly because of this connection to New York and the United States, that is an absolutely brilliant example of how New York had this modernist influence on Cuban culture that's absolutely brilliant. I guess the one last thing that I wanted to bring out here, we opened up by saying that New York was the most important city for Cubans in the U.S. until 1960. And just, you know, for those listeners who might not be up on their Cold War history, I mean, 1960 is already, you know, almost 60 years ago. Just remind us, what happened at that point that resulted in a shift of the Cuban-American immigrant community from kind of being focused on New York to being focused more on Miami, just kind of sum up for us those tumultuous moment in history. Going back to the 19th century when Cuba was going to New York, of course, the need just to say Miami did not exist, even exist at that time. So there was no option of Miami for Cuba's ever leaving Cuba in the 19th century. Even the early 20th century, there is a Cuban migration in the early 20th century. And in that migration, you know, again, the New York where the jobs are, it was not too different from the state of Puerto Rican migration to New York at the same time, you know, looking for jobs and so forth. So even into the 1940s and the '50s, still New York was the principal destination. Miami was sort of, you know, tourist city that was only really primarily for winter, you know, the winter tourists who came down and winter residents. But with the revolution that starts in Cuba in 1959, there were so many people who actually went to New York to Miami, they started going there. And it was an Exodus from 1959 to, certainly 1962 and then it continued as people leaving Cuba. I have to make that there, in 1958 or so, there would have been about 50,000 Cubans living in the United States. We're now looking at about a million, a point point, two million Cubans living in the United States. And 65, almost 70% of those living in Miami has because Miami has been a city that's largely since 1960, been shaped by Cubans. And Cubans, even those living in Cuba more recently, find here a more culturally and economically and so forth and more welcome in place. Right. All right. So the book is Sugar, Sagar's and Revolution, The Making of Cuban New York. It's published by NYU Press. The author is Lissandro Perez, professor at John J. College, part of the City University of New York. It is a terrifically engaging read for anyone who's interested in New York history or history of Cuba. Thank you so much, Professor Perez, for speaking with me today. Thank you for inviting me. And signing off now, I'm Beth Harpaz, editor of the CUNY website, Sum, that's sum.cuny.edu, where we showcase faculty research like the book we've been talking about. Check us out. And on Twitter, we're at Sum_research. Finally, thanks to the Gotham Center and New Books Network for inviting me to guest host this podcast.