Constructing Cuban America
Constructing Cuban America
Race and Identity in Florida's Caribbean South, 1868–1945
How Black and white Cubans navigated issues of race, politics, and identity during the post-Civil War and early Jim Crow eras in South Florida.
On July 4, 1876, during the centennial celebration of US independence, the city of Key West was different from other cities. In some of post–Civil War Florida, Black residents were hindered from participating in 4th of July festivities, but Key West's celebration, “led by a Cuban revolutionary mayor working in concert with a city council composed of Afro-Bahamians, Cubans, African Americans, and Anglos,” represented a profound exercise in interracial democracy amid the Radical Reconstruction era.
Constructing Cuban America examines the first Cuban American communities in South Florida—Key West and Tampa—and how race played a central role in shaping the experiences of white and Black Cubans. Andrew Gomez argues that factors such as the Cuban independence movement and Radical Reconstruction produced interracial communities of Cubans that worked alongside African Americans and Afro-Bahamians in Florida, yielding several successes in interracial democratic representation, even as they continued to wrestle with elements of racial separatism within the Cuban community. But the conclusion of the Cuban War of Independence and early Jim Crow laws led to a fracture in the Cuban-American community. In the process, both Black and white Cubans posited distinct visions of Cuban-American identity.
With deft prose, keen analysis, and a trove of original source material, Andrew Gomez traces the multiracial Cuban settlement of South Florida from the end of Reconstruction through the 1940s. He shows how segregation, disenfranchisement, and racial terror reshaped the ethnic identifications of both white and Black Cubans. Exclusion from electoral politics, repression of multiracial unionism, criminalization of interracial families, and reframing of legitimate ethnic expression around the concept of Americanization, gave new meaning and power to racial fractures within Cuban immigrant communities.
In Constructing Cuban America, Andrew Gomez tells a nuanced, engaging, and deeply humane story about the making and remaking of Cuban American racial identities in the Caribbean South. Highly recommended.
Andrew Gomez is an associate professor of history at the University of Puget Sound.
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Retracing Race in Cuban South Florida
- 1. Multiracial Democracy and Radical Reconstruction: Cubans in Key West, 1868–1888
- 2. Liberty and Labor in Cuban South Florida
- 3. The Specter of Jim Crow and the Limits of Interracial Democracy
- 4. “Two Cultures at the Same Time”: Blackness and Whiteness in Cuban South Florida
- 5. Cuban Americans, the Depression, and World War II
- Epilogue: Memory and Historic Cuban America
- Notes
- Index
