[revised from original publication date]
The Intersection of Cuban and Irish Nationalism in 19th Century New York
by John
McAuliff
[for
presentation at the American Irish Historical Society, September, 23, 2024]
When
Ireland’s President Michael D. Higgins visited Cuba in 2017, he spoke about the
two countries special bond:
“Irish and Cuban people have in common a proud sense of their
national identity, a passion for freedom… In the past, both of our people have
shared an experience of living in the shadow of a powerful neighbor. We are two
island nations who have been marked by colonization and that have had to
wrestle their freedom from the grip of empires,”[i]
This is a
theme memorialized in a plaque at the foot of Havana’s O’Reilly Street in
Spanish, English and Gaelic, said to be placed in 1998 but it is not clear by
whom or why. “Two island peoples in the
same sea of struggle and hope. Cuba and Ireland”.
My purpose
in this paper is to highlight some of the nineteenth century intersections via
the Irish immigrant population in the US between the two island countries’ paths
to independence. Their parallel experiences
of failed insurrections and political struggle seems a story not well known in
any of the three countries. It continued
into the first part of the 20th century as both Cuba and Ireland
achieved incomplete and imperfect sovereignty.
The Early
Colonial Period and US Independence
Manuel A. Tellechea,
a Cuban American from New Jersey, summarized the important role of Irish
who came to Cuba via Spain in a blog
post on St. Patrick’s Day, 2005:
“The largest Irish migration prior to the Great Potato Famine
of 1848 was to Spain in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Irish, who
were awarded Spanish citizenship on arriving in Spain as persecuted
Catholics, joined the Spanish army's Hibernian regiments and
became Spain's best soldiers and most famous generals. Many of these were
posted in Cuba and married into the island's aristocracy,
establishing our own great Irish-Cuban families (the O'Farrills, the O'Reillys,
the Kindelans, the Madans, the Duanys, the O'Gabans, the Coppingers and the
O'Naughtens). Four Captains General of Cuba were of Irish origin (Nicolás
Mahy; Sebastián Kindelán; Leopoldo O'Donnell and Luís Prendergast).”[ii]
Irish people
served at high levels in government and in senior military positions. The
lighthouse at El Morro, the fort that guards Havana Bay, had been
known as "O'Donnell's Lighthouse", after the Spanish governor, a
relative of Red Hugh O'Donnell.
The
O'Farrill family came from Longford via Montserrat. They rose to
prominence as slave traders, importers and sugar plantation owners. Descendants
were active in the anti-slavery movement.
One family mansion has been restored as a beautiful boutique
hotel. The other is the residence of the Bishop of Havana.
Returning to
the street just cited, the person
honored, General Alejandro O’Reilly was born in 1723 in County Meath.[iii] His family moved to Spain when he was a
child, part of the flight of Wild Geese from English Protestant
domination. O’Reily arrived in Cuba on 3
July 1763 as British forces were withdrawing from their eleven month conquest
of Havana. In 1765 he was named
governor general of Puerto Rico. In both
Cuba and Puerto Rico he created a local militia, including blacks and mulattoes,
to supplement Spanish troops. In Cuba’s
case, in later generations they were a source of fighters for independence. O’Reilly married into a prominent Cuban family and was
appointed governor of Spain’s colony in Louisiana
in 1769.
Cubans
played a seldom recognized part in the American revolution. Spanish forces defeated British troops from
1779 to 1781, capturing forts on the Mississippi, in Mobile and cities in west
Florida. The British were defeated by a
Spanish force of 7,000 troops, 4,000 of whom came from Cuba.
“A Cuban field
marshal, Juan Manuel de Cagigal (who hailed from Santiago de Cuba), deployed
troops to block the British escape both by sea and by land…The British saw no
other alternative than to surrender to the Spanish, who once again secured
western Florida with the aid of an army largely composed of Cuban men that
included free slaves and mulattoes among their ranks.”[iv]
An important
Irish component was Spain’s Hibernia Regiment[v]
commanded by Arturo O'Neill de Tyrone y O'Kelly, born in Dublin, who
became governor of the reclaimed colony of West Florida from 1781 to 1792.
In 1781, the
American revolution received desperately needed funds from Cuba, thanks to the
same de Cagigal who had become governor.
The money came from both government and private sources, including by
legend from women who pawned their jewelry.
Spain, like France, had its own strategic reasons to aid rebels against
their English enemies. Did Cuban
enthusiasm also come from identification with a hopefully precedent-setting
struggle for independence in the Americas?
Venerable
Felix Varela, A Hero of Two Nations
The
strongest Cuban Irish American link begins in St. Augustine, in the East
Florida colony, in 1790 when the orphaned Felix Varela’s maternal grandfather
was named General of its military garrison. The Irish priest and vicar of East Florida,
Miguel O’ Reilly, was Varela’s inspiration and teacher, including of the Irish
language. Varela studied at San Carlos Seminary and the
University of Havana, was ordained and taught philosophy. Known for his advocacy of self-government,
abolition of slavery and equal education of women, he was elected to the
democratic Spanish Cortes in 1821. Absolutist
royal rule regained power in Spain in 1823.
“In his
position as representative of Cuba in Spanish Court, he signed an invalidation
of the Spanish king and was sentenced to death as a result.” [vi] Varela found asylum in the United States,
arriving in New York Harbor on December 15, 1823. At first in Philadelphia, but largely in New
York, as a Parish priest he became a compassionate advocate for the poor,
especially for Irish immigrants in whose language he became fluent. He wrote, “I work hard to help Irish
families build schools for their children, and I tend cholera patients, and I
defend Irish American boys and girls against insults from mobs who hate them
just because their parents are immigrants.” [vii]
For a time Varela
remained active in the intellectual and political life of his homeland,
publishing a magazine, El Habanero, from 1824 to 1826 in which he explicitly advocated
independence. He rejected the arguments
of Cubans who believed the country would fare best if annexed by a larger
country like Mexico, Colombia or the US.
"I am the first to oppose the union of the island to any
government. I should wish to see her as much of a political island as she is
such in geographical terms."[viii]
Spain sent
an assassin to eliminate him in 1825.
His Irish parishioners protected his location, but according to the publication
the New York Catholic, “One day, walking the streets of his parish, the
priest encountered the man who had been sent to murder him. In a spirit of
compassionate forgiveness, he approached the would-be assassin and counseled
him against committing a grave sin. The man listened. Then he returned to Cuba,
his mission unfulfilled”[ix]
Varela was
an extraordinary public intellectual, challenging the most vicious
anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant propaganda of his era, but also building
ecumenical relationships with Protestant church leaders. Having great administrative talents, he was
named Vicar General of the New York diocese that covered all of New York State
and the northern half of New Jersey. He was also a prodigious fund-raiser, creating
two churches and accompanying schools between 1827 and 1836. While designed to meet the needs of the
burgeoning Irish population, they were not ethnically exclusive. The second, the Church of the
Transfiguration, is still an immigrant but now mostly Chinese church at a new
location on Mott Street, with his statue by the entrance.
The only
reference I could find to Varela’s engagement with the issue of Ireland itself
was his participation in New York City in a May 1, 1843 “Approbation meeting”
of the Friends of Ireland and Universal Liberty in support of publication of
Thomas Mooney's lectures on Irish history.[x]
Their statement can be found in the
preface of “A History of Ireland: From Its First Settlement to the Present Time”
by Thomas Mooney. That they felt it
necessary to collectively advocate publication of the book and the tone and
content of their words are reminiscent of voices in our time pressing for
publications that reflect African American and Latin American history and
perspectives.
“It would make an excellent school book, which we much
wanted, for it was a lamentable fact, that the youth of this country never saw
a History of Ireland, simply because there is really no such work, complete, in
existence . Even the children of Irish parents forget the blessed and revered
land of their forefathers, or learn of it only through the vicious medium of
English calumniators.”
Much to the
dismay of friends and political supporters in Cuba, Varela’s intellectual focus
shifted almost entirely to his responsibilities in New York and issues related
to his Irish immigrant flock. Because of
illness, Varela retired to his boyhood home in St. Augustin in 1848, the height
of famine caused Irish immigration to New York.
He tried to return to New York three times but his health did not permit
and he died in 1853
[A topic for more scholarly research is Varela’s
long term reputation and impact with the Irish community in New York. Among the New York Irish was there for one or
more generations any special interest or affection for Cuba because of the role
he played in their religious lives, economic survival and education?]
Streams
of Integration
Irish
emigrants and their descendents in Spain and in North America found their way
to Cuba throughout the 17th, 18th and 19th
centuries. Many are named in the
pioneering research of Rafael Fernandez Moya, “The Irish Presence in the
History and Place Names of Cuba”, published by the Society for Irish Latin
American Studies (SILAS).[xi]
Moya briefed
President Higgins during his visit to Cuba in 20 XXXXX He tells contrasting stories of the Irish
experience in the first half of the 19th century:
“Juan O’Bourke, who was born in Trinidad around 1826 and
twenty-five years later took part in the armed uprising of July 1826 organised
by Isidoro Armenteros, collaborator of the expansionist general Narciso López,
lived in this city [Cienfuegos] from 1839. The young revolutionary Juan
O’Bourke was arrested and later condemned to ten years in prison in Ceuta from
whence he escaped and headed to the United States….
In June 1855 a boy named Juan Byrnes, whose father was
Gregorio and his godmother Margarita Byrnes, was baptised in Havana. This
surname became part of the heart of the intellectual community of Matanzas.
Firstly, this happened through the educational work of Juana Byrnes de Clayton,
the first headmistress of the school for poor girls. This school would later
become the Casa de Beneficencia, founded in 1846”
Moya writes
that the Irish who came to build Cuba’s first railroad in the 1830s did not
have an easy experience:
“The Junta de Fomento brought the technicians, foremen,
superintendents and a group of workers made up of 273 men and 8 women from the
United States under contract, among whom were English, Irish, Scottish, North
American, Dutch and German labourers. However, they were all identified as
Irish, perhaps due to the greater numbers of those of that nationality.
While the work was being carried out, the so-called Irish
workers and Canary Islanders were subjected to hard labour beyond their
physical endurance, receiving insufficient food in return. Nor were they
assured the pay and treatment previously agreed upon. After some weeks putting
up with mistreatment and hunger the “Irish” workers and Canary Islanders
decided to demand their rights from the administration of the railway works and
when these were not adequately met, they launched the first workers’ strike recorded
in the history of the island. The repression was bloody; the Spanish governors
ordered the troops to act against the disgruntled workers, resulting in injury
and death.”
Other Irish
coming via the US to Cuba found a smoother path.
“It has been said that the introduction of the steam engine
and other improvements in the sugar industry, Cuba’s main economic activity in
that period, was mainly the work of North American growers who had settled on
the island, particularly in the areas surrounding Matanzas and Cárdenas, north
coast districts which, according to the opinion of the Irish writer Richard R.
Madden, had more characteristics in common with North American towns than those
of Spain.
One of the growers who had come from the United States named
Juan D. Duggan was, according to the Cuban chemist and agronomist Alvaro
Reynoso, one of the first farmers in the country to plant sugar cane over great
distances…. The introduction of the steam engine on the sugar plantations
resulted in the necessity to hire operators or machinists in the main from the
United States and England. After the administrator, the most important job in a
sugar plantation was without a doubt that of machinist, who had to work like an
engineer because, besides being responsible for all repairs, sometimes they had
to come up with real innovations in the machinery.”
Irish and
Irish American Support for Cuban Independence
The
democratic instincts of Irish Americans confronted the colonial attitudes of
the Spanish Irish in the Cuban aristocracy:
“Some of these foreign technicians living in the Matanzas
region became involved in a legal trial, accused of complicity with the
enslaved African people’s plans for a revolt, which were abandoned in 1844. Six
of them were originally from England, Ireland and Scotland: Enrique Elkins,
Daniel Downing, Fernando Klever, Robert Hiton, Samuel Hurrit and Thomas Betlin.
The number of people arrested later grew and all were treated
violently during interrogation. In November 1844 the English consul Mr. Joseph
Crawford informed the Governor and Captain General of the island, Leopoldo
O’Donnell, that the British subjects Joseph Leaning and Pat O’Rourke had died
after being released. The doctors who treated them indicated that the physical
and moral suffering they had endured in the prison was the cause of death. One
of the streets in Cienfuegos was given the name of the infamous Governor of the
Island, Leopoldo O’Donnell, who embarked on a bloody campaign of repression
against the Afro-Cuban population and against the white people who supported
their cause.”
Charles
Blakely from Charleston was Cuba’s first mulatto dentist (Black mother,
Irish-American father). He was arrested
in 1844 by Capitán General Leopoldo O´Donnell as the Havana leader of the
Escalera slave rebellion. Notorious due
to the brutality of his repression, O’Donnell was born in the Canary Islands
but his grandfather emigrated to Spain from County Mayo.
Another
fatal path with a political agenda that brought Irish Americans to Cuba were two
annexationist expeditions led by the Venezuelan Narciso López in 1849
and 1851. Annexationism had both
reactionary proslavery and progressive prodemocracy constituencies in each
country. But when López arrived with his
multiethnic American expeditionary forces including Irishmen, they received
very little support from Cubans and were easily defeated by the Spanish and
executed or harshly imprisoned. Ironically
the failed landing by Lopez in Cardenas, despite its annexationist goal, brought
Cuba its national flag.
Moya
recounts the Irish role in Cuba’s unsuccessful Ten Year War of Independence
against Spain (1868-1878):
“From the beginning, the Cuban Liberation Army had the
support of patriots who had emigrated to or organized outside of Cuba, mainly
in the United States where they raised funds, bought arms and munitions and
recruited volunteers who enlisted to fight for the liberation of Cuba from the
Spanish yoke. Among the foreign volunteers was the Canadian William
O’Ryan.…Upon the US American general Thomas Jordan’s arrival, who was named
Chief of the High Command and later Head of the Liberation Army in the Camagüey
region, W. O’Ryan was named inspector and chief of cavalry, before attaining
the rank of general. He was sent on a mission to the United States, from where
he set out to return to Cuba at the end of October 1873. He sailed aboard the
American steamship Virginius…. The Virginius was captured by the Spanish
warship Tornado off Cuban waters and was towed into the bay of Santiago de Cuba
on 1 December. Five days later, by order of the Spanish authorities, all the
leaders of the revolutionary expedition were executed, O’Ryan among them. On 7
December the ship’s captain, Joseph Fry, and 36 members of the crew, were
executed, causing a diplomatic and political conflict between Spain and the
United States. In honour of the independence fighter O’Ryan a street of the
Sagarra subdivision in Santiago de Cuba was given his name.”
The Fenians/Clan
Na Gael sent James J O'Kelly to Cuba in 1873 to report on the Ten Years’ War for
the New York Herald, owned by a Catholic Scottish nationalist. His
mission included potential alliance with the Cuban revolutionaries. From research funded by the Society for Irish
Latin American Studies and published in its 2019 collection “Ireland &
Cuba, Entangled Histories”[xii]
José Antonio Quintana writes
During the days he spent alongside Céspedes, they reached an
agreement that would have had great mutual benefits for the causes of both
colonies, and which illustrates the journalist’s sympathy and commitment to the
island’s revolution. The Fenian’s idea was to make Ireland aware of the
militancy of the Cubans, with the help of the Irish emigrants residing in the
United States. The agreement stipulated that if he managed it successfully,
then the Cuban revolutionary government, once in power, would give O’Kelly
twenty thousand rifles and a ship to be used to carry out the subversion in Ireland
(Céspedes, 1982: 185). This project never came to fruition.
O’Kelley’s articles
and his book, The Mambi Land[xiii],
were influential with Irish-Americans and a wider audience. After returning to Ireland he became a Parnellite
MP for Roscommon North and wrote on foreign affairs for The Independent. The paper supported Cuba’s final independence
struggle, characterizing it as “the Ireland of the West,” and applauded the US
war with Spain as a “just and holy crusade”. “It openly wished that America would
intervene in Ireland as in Cuba”. When William
Astor Chanler, the millionaire US brother of a board member “fitted out a
warship at his own expense; the Independent published glowing reports of his
Cuban exploits.”[xiv]
Tammany
Hall and Dynamite Johnny O’Brien
The
institution through which immigrant Irish gained political power in New York
was Tammany Hall, or more precisely the General Committee of the
Democratic-Republican Party. The Irish role
in Tammany Hall emerged in 1817 and grew during Felix Varela’s time. “In New York, the famine emigration of
1846-1850 established the basis of Irish domination. There were 133,730
Irish-born citizens by the mid-century, 26 percent of the total population.”[xv] Most arrived with little or no resources and
began their new lives in poverty. Tammany Hall provided employment, shelter,
and even sometimes citizenship[xvi]
On April 4,
1855, the New York Times reported that Chairman H.P. Carr submitted “spicey
resolutions” on Cuba to the Young Men’s Democratic-Republican General Committee,
meeting at Tammany Hall. They
incorporated concern about “interference of ‘a new Holy Alliance by the
Monarchical Powers of Western Europe’] between a struggling and oppressed
people and their oppressors to crush the one and lend new means of cruelty and
oppression to the other.” Citing the
authority of the Monroe Doctrine, Carr “advocated the necessity of having a
guarantee…that there would be no more insults to the American flag by the
authorities of Spain.” The Times
reported, “The resolutions were adopted unanimously.” [xvii]
[Deeper
digging could determine whether Mr. Carr or any others on the General Committee
were interested in Cuba because they were involved with or benefited from the
work of Father Varela.]
In the 1880s,
Tammany Hall provided meeting spaces for Jose Marti and others to debate, organize
and celebrate their struggle for Cuba’s independence. Tammany also made the largest financial contribution
from any American source in the fall of 1897.
In his memoir, "A Captain Unafraid"[xviii], Dynamite Johnny O’Brien has this observation:
In their three and a half active years the Cuban delegations
in the United States expended approximately $1,500,000, practically all of
which passed through the hands of Mr. Palma. Of this amount Americans gave less
than $75,000. The largest American
offering was $20,000 from Tammany Hall in the fall of 1897, at which time we
were badly in need of funds with which to purchase arms and ammunition.
Cuba Libre was being talked of with such encouraging
enthusiasm that it threatened to become a political issue, and shrewd old Dick
Croker, the boss of Tammany, concluded it would be the part of wisdom to extend
substantial as well as sentimental aid. He sent word to the delegation, through
one of our friends, that Tammany had a little balance" left over from the
last election, and that if some of the Cuban chiefs would attend the next
meeting of the executive committee it would be turned over to them. But for
Heavens sake, was his parting message. don't let them do any talking.
Accordingly Mr. Palma, Dr. Castillo, General Nuses, and one
or two others put on their best black clothes and attended the following
meeting of the committee. They sat around with long faces, but spoke never a
word. Mr. Croker reported the unexpended balance, and on his motion it was
donated to the Cubans for the aid of the sick and wounded, which was the
stereotyped form for all such gifts.[xix]
Horatio S.
Rubens who served as legal counsel for the revolutionaries, wrote that Tammany
gave $30,000. Whether Rubens or Obrien
had the correct figure, the amount was substantial, in current value the
equivalent of $582,000 or $873,000.
Potentially
is this also a legacy of Father Varela’s? Croker was born in County Cork in
1843 and was brought to the US two years later.
Could his parents have known Varela?
Did he go to one of Varela’s schools?
O’Brien may
have the correct explanation but Terry Golway who wrote “Machine Made, Tammany
Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics”, documents that both Coker
and another leader, Congressman William Bourke Cockran were anti-imperialist
based on their experience with the English.
Cockran who was born in County Sligo in 1854 was a mentor and
inspiration of Winston Churchill and served as Grand Sachem of Tammany from 1905
to 1908. In 1899, he, “protested
American expansion in Cuba and the Philippines at an anti-imperialism rally in
Manhattan’s Academy of Music.”[xx]
Harry Boland
told an Irish reporter in 1921, “Between you and me, Tammany Hall has given
more aid to the [rebel] cause than any other single body.”[xxi]
Dynamite Johnny O’Brien was born in New York in 1837. His parents immigrated from County Longford in 1831 and lived on the lower east side [posing again the question of possible relationship to Father Varela]. He was a pilot in New York harbor before becoming a "filibuster", a smuggler of arms. During the successful independence war, he made over a dozen deliveries of weapons and personnel in every quadrant of Cuba's coast. O'Brien evaded efforts by Spain, the US and Pinkerton detectives to arrest, capture or kill him. He successfully commanded what the Cuban newspaper Granma[xxii] has described as the sole engagement of the Mambisi navy near Cienfuegos. O'Brien's integrity and heroism were so appreciated that he became Havana's first port captain after Cuba achieved its independence through a special act of the legislature. He was also forgiven his transgressions by the US government enough to symbolically command the re-sinking of the Maine outside of Cuban waters. His role was reported in the New York Times but not acknowledged in US government documents.
Johnny’s story
was documented by the Irish filmmaker Charlie O’Brien. It can be seen here https://youtu.be/E2pSwgTNwEE and is accounted in Charlie’s essay “The Lure
of Troubled Waters”.[xxiii]
A plaque commemorating Johnny on the wall of the original
Customs House at the entrance of the Plaza de Armas.
Honoring the anniversary of Johnny with several of his descendants,
staff and students from the Provincial Library, historian Rafael
Fernandez Moya and a song written and performed by Enrique Nunez.
The Cuban Roots of Eamon De Valera
I will
finish with the controversial report of an unintended but significant
contribution of Cuba to Irish history. The
grandfather of Ireland’s independence leader and President Eamon de Valera
was Cuban, active in the sugar trade in Matanzas Province. Juan
Manuel de Valera reportedly sent his son Juan Vivian, an aspiring sculptor and
music teacher, to New York to avoid the Spanish draft. Vivian
married or had a relationship with Katherine Coll from
Bruree, County Limerick. Their son Eamon de Valera was born in
1882 and sent to Ireland to live with his mother’s family after his
father’s death, probably from tuberculosis in, 1885.
Frank
Connolly wrote the most definitive account in the Sunday Business Post in 1996[xxiv]
“The Long Fellow withheld the details of his father Vivian’s
origins for most of his life but told his children and grandchildren some years
before his death that his father, who died when Eamon was two years old, was
from sugar farming stock near the Cuban capital, Havana. The young Dev was told the story when he
visited his mother Kathleen Coll for the first time during his famous
fundraising trip to the US in 1919, and heard further details when he met her
again in the States in 1927….It seems that after his father’s death the
grandparents wanted the boy back in Cuba and that is why Kathleen sent him back
to Ireland with her uncle who was visiting there, said O Cuiv…Eamon O Cuiv
recalls that as a child his grandfather showed him a family bible in the Aras
which in the flyleaf carried a note referring to his father’s Cuban
origins. Dev called his eldest son Vivian
in memory of a man he hardly knew, and told his children and grandchildren of
how his mother had recounted the sad tale of their separation. ‘He never made a big deal of it, but he must
have been very conscious of his father or he would not have called his own
eldest son after him,’ said O Cuiv, who believed that Dev may not have made an
issue of his Cuban origins for fear of being accused of trying to cash in on
the wealth of his father’s family in pre-revolutionary Cuba.”
An
alternative explanation of de Valera’s reticence to discuss his origins is that
a marriage certificate between Vivian and Kathleen has not been found despite
research in the New Jersey church where they were said to have wed. Being born out of wedlock could have been a
political burden in a very Catholic Ireland.
[A topic
worthy of further research is locating the passenger list of arrivals in New
York from Havana that includes Vivian de Valera.]
Conclusion
To sum up, I
suspect that very few people in Ireland, Cuba and among Americans of Irish
descent are conscious of how much of a conceptual and practical link existed
between Cuba’s and Ireland’s struggles to achieve independence from colonial
masters in the 19th century and how much involvement there was from a
triangular relationship with the Irish population in the US.
As I
suggested in the beginning there is a twentieth and twenty-first century
chapter to the story.
As the price
of achieving peace and independence Ireland had to accept the separation of the
northeast portion of the nation, most of the traditional province of Ulster. Mutual respect between England and a sovereign
Ireland took decades. The Irish Republic
was only proclaimed in 1949, twenty-seven years after independence. Irish friends identify as the symbolic moment
of mutual respect the separate and equal entry into the European Community of
both Ireland and the United Kingdom in 1973.
The problem of reintegration of the north remains an obstacle to the
fulfillment of Ireland’s national potential and identity although thanks to the
Good Friday Agreement and the unintended consequences of Brexit, the border is
a diminishing obstacle in practice if not in theory.
Cuba’s independence
was compromised by its obligation to accept the Platt amendment. Until 1934 the US had the right to
reintervene militarily, doing so twice. In order to achieve national self-determination
and the withdrawal of US troops, Cuba had to accept the partition of an
important part of its national territory, the base and prison of
Guantanamo. Politically, culturally and
economically the two countries became deeply integrated with the US as the dominant
partner. The Cuban revolution of 1959 achieved
political independence but it has not been able to establish a deeper autonomy
from the US as effectively as Ireland did from England.
Confronted
by virtually unabating hostility and regime change objectives from Washington
and Miami, with the partial exception of President Obama’s second term, Cuban
leaders have been constricted economically, politically and
psychologically. In the minds of
revolutionary leaders, maintaining freedom from US dominance required radical
transformation of their country’s economy, ideological rigidity, overdependence
on a balancing superpower and oppressive state control/protection of a
population inherently vulnerable to covert and overt subversion from the north.
The context created by the US, whether
intentionally or by propinquity, meant the harder Cuba had to fight to maintain
its independence the more it had to sacrifice of its fundamental revolutionary
goal to advance the lives of its people.
Because of
my own experience with Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia, it is hard to escape the
underlying reality that the missing ingredient is the mutual respect that the
US extended to its former enemies in Indochina, recognition of their right to
full self-determination, with differences in governance and ideology, including
human rights, that it has never extended to Cuba over more than two centuries.
The memory
of Father Felix Varela can help restore Barack Obama’s partially opened door to
Cuba, closed by President Trump and only partially recovered by President Biden. Varela’s continued standing in Cuba was
symbolized by the visit by the late Eusebio Leal, the widely respected Historian
of Old Havana, to the original burial site of Father Varela in St. Augustine,
Florida.
In addition,
the President of Cuba, Miguel Diaz-Canel, a year ago went to the Church of the
Transfiguration to meet Brooklyn’s Bishop Cisneros, a Cuban American who heads
the Vatican court considering Varela’s qualifications for beatification.
If Pope
Francis returns to Cuba to honor Varela, Cubans will emphasize his national
identity as “the man who taught us to think” and an early advocate of
independence, abolition and equal education.
Irish Americans should be present to lift up his contribution to our
liberation two centuries ago in New York.
[i] https://www.irishamerica.com/2017/03/report-from-havana-irish-latin-american-conference/
[ii] http://reviewofcuban-americanblogs.blogspot.com/2008/03/cubans-too-have-bit-of-blarney.html
[iii] Dictionary
of Irish Biography https://www.dib.ie/biography/oreilly-count-alexander-a6980
[iv] Carlyle
House Docent Dispatch https://www.novaparks.com/sites/default/files/pdf/March2004.pdf
[v] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Pensacola
[vi] https://cubanthinkers.domains.uflib.ufl.edu/felix-varela/
[vii] https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2076178949
[viii]
https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/varela-y-morales-felix-1788-1853
[ix] https://archwaysmag.org/venerable-felix-varela
[x]https://books.google.com/books?id=_exVAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA2&lpg=PA2&dq=Friends+of+Ireland+Thomas+Mooney+Felix+Varela&source=bl&ots=5StDyYXPdR&sig=ACfU3U2dbmHxPc4wD5FArAq3vcZyET8uYQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiduYiVvYf_AhW6KlkFHU4WCCcQ6AF6BAgsEAM#v=onepage&q=Friends%20of%20Ireland%20Thomas%20Mooney%20Felix%20Varela&f=false
[xi] https://www.irlandeses.org/0711fernandezmoya1.htm
[xii]
Ireland & Cuba, Entangled Histories, edited by Margaret Brehony and Nuala
Finnegan, Ediciones Bolona pp 222 https://irlandeses.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Irlanda-y-Cuba-historias-entretejidas-030120-with-cover.pdf
[xiii]
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101020878607&view=1up&seq=11
[xiv] https://www.historyireland.com/cuba-the-ireland-of-the-west-the-irish-daily-independent-and-irish-nationalist-responses-to-the-spanish-american-war/
[xv] Christiane Köppe (Author), 2005,
Irish Immigrants in New York City 1850, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/109765
[xvi] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammany_Hall
[xviii]
https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Captain_Unafraid/5JYnAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1
[xix]
A Captain Unafraid by Captain Johnny Dynamite O’Brien, pp 279-80
[xx] “Machine
Made” by Terry Golway, Liveright Publishing 2014 pp 171
[xxi] “Machine
Made” by Terry Golway, Liveright Publishing 2014 pp 223
[xxii]
http://www.granma.cu/cuba/2016-12-19/aniversario-120-del-unico-combate-naval-mambi-19-12-2016-22-12-11
[xxiii]
https://cubapeopletopeople.blogspot.com/2017/06/dynamite-johnny-obrien-through-lens-of.html
[xxiv]
Sunday Business Post, 11th
August 1996
Originally presented in May 2023 for the Latin American Studies Association conference in Vancouver; modified after sharing at the conference of the Society for Irish Latin American Studies (SILAS) at the University of Galway in June 2023; revised for a Conference of the Center for International Policy Research (CIPI), Havana, December 8, 2023
Comments and questions very welcome
jmcauliff@ffrd.org +1-917-859-9025 (phone and Whatsapp)
***********************************************************
Irish Links to
Cuba
https://cubapeopletopeople.blogspot.com/2017/02/irish-links-to-cuba.html
A Walking Tour of Irish Old Havana
https://cubapeopletopeople.blogspot.com/2017/03/a-walking-tour-of-irish-old-havana.html
Video of Mick Moloney in
Holguin and Santiago with the Green Fields of Cuba https://youtu.be/-1FnKrBurpA
