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Envisioning Cuba
Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States
In the mid-nineteenth century, some of Cuba's most influential writers settled in U.S. cities and published a variety of newspapers, pamphlets, and books. Collaborating with military movements known as filibusters, this generation of exiled writers created a body of literature demanding Cuban independence from Spain and alliance with or annexation to the United States.
Drawing from rare materials archived in the United States and Havana, Rodrigo Lazo offers new readings of works by writers such as Cirilo Villaverde, Juan Clemente Zenea, Pedro Santacilia, and Miguel T. Tolon. Lazo argues that to understand these writers and their publications, we must move beyond nation-based models of literary study and consider their connections to both Cuba and the United States. Anchored by the publication of Spanish- and English-language newspapers in the United States, the transnational culture of writers Lazo calls los filibusteros went hand in hand with a long-standing economic flow between the countries and was spurred on by the writers' belief in the American promise of freedom and the hemispheric ambitions of the expansionist U.S. government. Analyzing how U.S. politicians, journalists, and novelists debated the future of Cuba, Lazo argues that the war of words carried out in Cuban-U.S. print culture played a significant role in developing nineteenth-century conceptions of territory, colonialism, and citizenship.
Drawing from rare materials archived in the United States and Havana, Rodrigo Lazo offers new readings of works by writers such as Cirilo Villaverde, Juan Clemente Zenea, Pedro Santacilia, and Miguel T. Tolon. Lazo argues that to understand these writers and their publications, we must move beyond nation-based models of literary study and consider their connections to both Cuba and the United States. Anchored by the publication of Spanish- and English-language newspapers in the United States, the transnational culture of writers Lazo calls los filibusteros went hand in hand with a long-standing economic flow between the countries and was spurred on by the writers' belief in the American promise of freedom and the hemispheric ambitions of the expansionist U.S. government. Analyzing how U.S. politicians, journalists, and novelists debated the future of Cuba, Lazo argues that the war of words carried out in Cuban-U.S. print culture played a significant role in developing nineteenth-century conceptions of territory, colonialism, and citizenship.
264 pages, Paperback
First published March 21, 2005
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February 14, 2013
I reviewed this book for a class assignment. Here are the first few paragraphs from that review:
The iconic image of the filibuster may well be that of Jimmy Stewart in the 1939 Hollywood film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, his hair awry and tie loosened, crumpled papers in hand -- an inexperienced but unwaveringly principled statesman who demands his right of free speech on the floor of the United States Senate. The Stewart performance, nominated for an Academy Award and ranked #11 in the American Film Institute’s list of cinema’s greatest heroes, depicts the filibuster as iconoclast, the act of filibustering as an expression of determined American individualism. Even in the (first) Obama administration, when it has been increasingly applied to Republicans whose Congressional debates are believed intended to delay, rather than to improve, the bills put before them, the term filibuster continues to smack of unyielding individualism.
But as Rodrigo Lazo, a professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Irvine, insists in Writing to Cuba, the fictional senator Smith (to say nothing of Tea Party Republicans) is (are) only the newest individual(s) to be classified as representatives of this word whose meaning has evolved significantly over three centuries. Derived from the Dutch vrijbuiter, which means freebooter, and later interchanged with buccaneer and pirate, by the middle of the nineteenth century the word filibuster had come to refer most often -- and pejora-tively -- to North American men like William Walker, the self-proclaimed president of Nicaragua, who “attempted to seize parts of Latin America” (5). It was in a Congressional debate over the annexation of Cuba, Lazo points out, that an American statesman first referred to an opponent as a filibuster, and more for advocating Cuba be bought/usurped than for obstructing legislation.
If this is what the term meant for many United States citizens in the antebellum nine-teenth century, however, it often meant something distinct for the Cuban desterrados who allied themselves with U.S. filibusters or who borrowed and refashioned the word to characterize their activism undertaken to free Cuba from the Spanish crown. In an introduction plus five deeply-researched chapters, Lazo charts the development of filibustering as word and concept in prose and poetry authored by Cubans but printed in the United States, constructing a genealogy of pre-Martí Latino writings that joins texts conventionally indexed as either “North American” (for example, Crane’s “The Open Boat”) or Cuban (El laúd del desterrado), or otherwise overlooked by either tradition, as with “woman of action” Emilia Casanova de Villaverde, analyzed in Chapter Three. In its attention to the early Latino press in the United States, the book is an insightful companion piece to Gruesz’s Ambassadors of Culture and Brickhouse’s Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Pubic Sphere; however, whereas Gruesz and Brickhouse theorize the hemisphere, in both cases seeking primarily to understand the role and symbol of the United States in the various American imaginaries, Lazo adopts a narrower approach. He restricts his focus to Cuba, Cuba’s domination by Spain, and the literary texts challenging that domination that a handful of exiled Cubans wrote and/or printed in the United States. [...]
The iconic image of the filibuster may well be that of Jimmy Stewart in the 1939 Hollywood film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, his hair awry and tie loosened, crumpled papers in hand -- an inexperienced but unwaveringly principled statesman who demands his right of free speech on the floor of the United States Senate. The Stewart performance, nominated for an Academy Award and ranked #11 in the American Film Institute’s list of cinema’s greatest heroes, depicts the filibuster as iconoclast, the act of filibustering as an expression of determined American individualism. Even in the (first) Obama administration, when it has been increasingly applied to Republicans whose Congressional debates are believed intended to delay, rather than to improve, the bills put before them, the term filibuster continues to smack of unyielding individualism.
But as Rodrigo Lazo, a professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Irvine, insists in Writing to Cuba, the fictional senator Smith (to say nothing of Tea Party Republicans) is (are) only the newest individual(s) to be classified as representatives of this word whose meaning has evolved significantly over three centuries. Derived from the Dutch vrijbuiter, which means freebooter, and later interchanged with buccaneer and pirate, by the middle of the nineteenth century the word filibuster had come to refer most often -- and pejora-tively -- to North American men like William Walker, the self-proclaimed president of Nicaragua, who “attempted to seize parts of Latin America” (5). It was in a Congressional debate over the annexation of Cuba, Lazo points out, that an American statesman first referred to an opponent as a filibuster, and more for advocating Cuba be bought/usurped than for obstructing legislation.
If this is what the term meant for many United States citizens in the antebellum nine-teenth century, however, it often meant something distinct for the Cuban desterrados who allied themselves with U.S. filibusters or who borrowed and refashioned the word to characterize their activism undertaken to free Cuba from the Spanish crown. In an introduction plus five deeply-researched chapters, Lazo charts the development of filibustering as word and concept in prose and poetry authored by Cubans but printed in the United States, constructing a genealogy of pre-Martí Latino writings that joins texts conventionally indexed as either “North American” (for example, Crane’s “The Open Boat”) or Cuban (El laúd del desterrado), or otherwise overlooked by either tradition, as with “woman of action” Emilia Casanova de Villaverde, analyzed in Chapter Three. In its attention to the early Latino press in the United States, the book is an insightful companion piece to Gruesz’s Ambassadors of Culture and Brickhouse’s Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Pubic Sphere; however, whereas Gruesz and Brickhouse theorize the hemisphere, in both cases seeking primarily to understand the role and symbol of the United States in the various American imaginaries, Lazo adopts a narrower approach. He restricts his focus to Cuba, Cuba’s domination by Spain, and the literary texts challenging that domination that a handful of exiled Cubans wrote and/or printed in the United States. [...]
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