H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-LatAm@h-net.msu.edu (October 2005)

Rodrigo Lazo. _Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the
United States_. Envisioning Cuba Series. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2005. 272 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.
$49.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8078-2930-7; $19.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8078-5594-4.

Reviewed for H-LatAm by Antonio Rafael de la Cova, Indiana
University--Bloomington

Cuban Filibusters: Continued Misunderstandings and Politically Sensitivity

During the first half of the nineteenth century, hundreds of Cuban
political exiles arrived in the United States in three waves: 1823, 1838,
and 1848. They were fleeing Spanish colonial oppression that denied them
their basic human rights. Some of them got involved in the two filibuster
military expeditions led by Narciso Lopez that invaded Cuba in 1850 and
1851. They were following the Texas model of independence and annexation by
first acquiring funds, weapons, and volunteers in the United States for
their endeavor. The expatriates created their own Spanish-language and
bilingual revolutionary newspapers. They received favorable publicity in
the Democratic press, while the Whig press denounced the filibusters as
outlaws and hirelings of slavery expansionists.

_Writing to Cuba_ is an extension of Lazo's 1998 American literature
dissertation "Filibustering an Empire: Transamerican Writing and U.S.
Expansionism," in the English Department of the University of Maryland at
College Park. Consequently, the writer focuses on the importance of
transnational publications in the nineteenth-century United States. He
examines a dozen Cuban exile publications and a Spanish royalist newspaper.
Eleven were published in New York, one in New Orleans, and another in
Havana, during 1848-1866. Some newspapers appeared for years, while others
disappeared after a dozen issues or less. Many articles were published
without bylines to avoid Spanish government reprisals. The author relied on
incomplete collections located in the Jose Marti National Library in Havana
and in scattered repositories in the United States. He analyzes each
publication's transnational content relating to nineteenth-century
politics. Lazo also describes the "poetry of armed combat" published in
these periodicals and gives his own interpretation of their metaphors and
meanings.

A substantial problem with this work is its classification as a history
book, which is not the author's main field of expertise. There are no
primary sources cited other than the thirteen newspapers the book is
largely based on. Secondary sources are also problematic. Lazo greatly
relies on Tom Chaffin's _Fatal Glory: Narciso Lopez and the First
Clandestine U.S. War Against Cuba_ (1996), cited fifteen times, for his
background on filibuster events. This book has been criticized in reviews
for its poor research, misspellings, inaccuracies, and lack of
Spanish-language comprehension. Lazo repeats Chaffin's error that
"Investors from the United States in 1828 founded Cardenas" (p. 8), instead
of the Count of Villanueva and Andres Jose de la Portilla. Lazo also cites
Chaffin when stating that Lopez's last expedition "included forty-nine
Cubans" (p. 29), unaware that this group contained some Venezuelans and
more than half of the others were Spaniards who deserted from the Cardenas
Company of the Leon Regiment and joined Lopez in Cuba in 1850.

As a result of relying on weak sources, Lazo provides cursory biographical
data on most of the leading exile literary figures. He writes (page 203, n.
76): "Scholars have estimated that [Pedro Angel] Castellon died in exile in
1856, but they have been unable to determine exactly where, how, or when.
His tomb has not been found." A perusal of newspapers from New Orleans,
where Castellon last resided, reveals that he died there on June 24, 1856,
and was interred in a local cemetery. Other important exile writers
neglected include Jose Agustin Quintero and Francisco Javier de la Cruz.
Quintero (1829-1885), whose biography _Jose Agustin Quintero: un enigma
historico en el exilio cubano del ochocientos_ was published by Jorge
Marban in 2001, was a noted poet, attorney, filibuster conspirator,
Confederate diplomat, and editor of the New Orleans _Picayune_. Lazo omits
mentioning Quintero's renowned poem "The Banquet of the Exiled" or his
English-language manuscript _Lyric Poetry in Cuba_, which is in the Boston
Public Library. De la Cruz (1804-1894) was a historian, journalist, poet,
and educator who landed with the Lopez expedition in Cardenas in 1850. Lazo
also overlooked _La Verdad_ collaborators Pedro de Aguero Sanchez, and
Tomas M. Rosis, a Savannah cigar maker and Georgia Militia private, whose
poetry appeared in the newspaper on August 12, 1850, and whose papers are
in the Duke University Library.

Cirilo Villaverde, the main exile figure in this work, is depicted as "a
man of action" and "revolutionary fighter" (pp. 100, 103, 107), emphasizing
"his participation in filibustering expeditions" (p. 170). The historical
record shows that Villaverde, who was General Lopez's personal secretary,
refused to go on both filibuster expeditions that landed in Cuba, failed to
join more than fifty other Cuban exiles who fought on opposite sides of the
American Civil War, and did not take up arms during the Cuban Ten Years'
War of Independence (1868-1878).

While the preface states that "This book focuses on the growth of a
community in which the publication of newspapers became an anchor for
writers in exile," the author does not substantiate the accurate size or
heterogeneity of the Cuban community in the United States. He describes the
expatriates as "arriving in large numbers" (p. 10), and their enclaves were
"rapidly growing" (p. 22), "growing" (p. 31), and "significant" in New
Orleans (p. 42). He then cites an erroneous secondary source to indicate
that "By 1853, the Cuban population in the United States probably numbered
several hundred" (p. 66). An analysis of the 1850 U.S. Federal census
indicates that there were 1,061 persons of Cuban birth in the nation. A
decade later, the number had doubled to 2,157, and by 1870 there were 6,710
Cubans in the United States.

Lazo provides little information about the newspapers that he cites. There
is no estimate of how many issues were printed or the number that were
shipped abroad. For example, he briefly describes _El Espejo_ newspaper as
"a commercial sheet filled with advertisements for U.S.-made export
products" that "circulated in Latin America" and was "owned and edited" by
Narciso Villaverde in 1882 (p. 169). In contrast, numerous R. G. Dun &
Company credit reports (Jan. 1874-Oct. 1897) indicate that _El Espejo_ was
founded in 1873 by W. H. Wilson and Andres Cassard at 67 William Street,
New York City. It was published on the 20th of each month and had "a
circulation of at least 10,000 ... through the West Indies, Mexico, Central
&
South America, & Spain." It was "originally started by and in the interest
of 9 South American Houses" and the subscription was three dollars annually
"in gold payable in advance." In 1879, William J. Cassard was the sole
proprietor after he "courted the daughter of a retired merchant & married
her & it is understood her relatives furnished some means to carry on the
business." When Narciso Villaverde acquired the newspaper in 1881, it had a
"moderate" number of subscribers and by 1883 it was "making no money." The
enterprise folded in 1897 after Cuban A. R. Govin won a judicial settlement
against it for $1,726.

This book also contains some redundancy missed by the editors. For example,
the sentence "In 1854, Emilia Casanova moved with her family from Cuba to
Philadelphia, where she met Cirilo Villaverde. The following year the two
were married and settled in the New York area," appears on page 119 and
again on page 131.

Lazo concludes his work by refusing to compare nineteenth-century Cuban
exile publications with those printed during the last five decades in the
United States because the "debates over annexation, slavery, and
filibustering, [are] issues that are not relevant to the post-1959 period."
The dozen publications that he analyzed all denounced totalitarianism,
despotism, censorship, oppression of basic freedoms, forced exile,
political imprisonment and execution, and championed liberty and democratic
institutions. These are the same themes addressed since 1959 in hundreds of
Cuban exile publications that are stored in the Cuban Heritage Collection
at the University of Miami and the ones that are still being published
today. Lazo acknowledges that in 1852 Cuban exiles "rejoiced at the
possibility that the presidential administration would provide military
backup for a filibustering attack on the island" (p. 34). He omitted
mention that these have been the same aspirations of most Cuban exiles
after President John Kennedy sponsored the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion.
Lazo indicated that in the nineteenth century "the liberation of Cuba was
inextricable from the return of exiles who were developing a different
conception of the government that would be established on the island" (p.
49) but does not see a correlation with present day dissidents. Such
comparisons would certainly annoy the Cuban government official who the
author thanks in the preface for access to the ideologically protected
National Library in Havana.



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