Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [962]
By 1897, this apparatus was to some degree under the control of Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, and jingoists had high hopes that President McKinley would surpass his predecessors in boldness, perhaps by securing a base in the Philippines and making Manila an American Hong Kong. Hawaii was another leading candidate for imperial enterprise. The Tribune, under the editorial helmsmanship of Whitelaw Reid (who had been Republican vice-presidential nominee on the losing 1892 ticket), declared that “the necessity for new markets is now upon us” and urged attaining sovereignty over Hawaii for its sugar, rice, and usefulness as a naval base and coaling station.
All that was missing was a war.
PRO PATRIA
The most likely venue for a military joust was Cuba—once again in rebellion against Spain. Not only was it a mere ninety miles from America’s shores, but the revolution itself, conveniently enough, was being run out of New York City.
After the upheavals of the 1870s, many Cuban rebels had fled to exile in Manhattan, where they joined Irish, German, and Russian immigrants in plotting the overthrow of their respective home-country governments. Since his arrival in 1880, the leader of the Cuban exile community had been poet and writer Jose Marti. Taking up quarters in a boardinghouse at 51 West 29th Street, Martí supported himself as a journalist—filing insightful copy on norteamericano culture and politics, especially New York City’s, to various Latin American newspapers.
Martí also built a revolutionary movement based on the growing Cuban cigarworker communities in U.S. cities, particularly New York, where the cigar trade was booming. By 1894 its three thousand factories (five hundred of them owned by Hispanics) provided jobs for the Cuban immigrants who settled into Yorkville and Chelsea boardinghouses. Many of these workers joined Marti’s Partido Revolucionario Cubano, bought its newspaper Patria, and flocked to Clarendon Hall to listen to the eloquent apostle and his colleagues.
Martí also drew support from New York’s small but growing Puerto Rican community. A tiny colonia had grown up in the city in the eighteenth century; by 1830 a Sociedad Benefica Cubana y Puertorriquena, composed of merchants from the islands, promoted trade exchanges. They did well. By 1897 roughly two-thirds of Puerto Rico’s sugar exports came to the United States and only about one-third went to Spain. With the sugar came the sons and daughters of the island’s mercantile and creole hacendado class—as students, exiles, and fomenters of separation from Spain.
Puerto Rico had also planned a rebellion in 1868. Directed from New York by Ramón Emeterio Betances and others, the rising was discovered and swiftly snuffed out. In the ensuing decades exile leaders like the fiery Eugenio María de Hostos established organizations and newspapers (including the evanescent La Voz de Puerto Rico) to carry on the struggle among immigrant cigarmakers, artisans, and laborers. Many joined the Puerto Rican branch of Marti’s party and organized their own political-cultural clubs. One such activist was Arthur Schomburg, newly arrived in the city in 1891 at age seventeen. Schomburg earned a living as an elevator operator, bellhop, porter, and printer, took night classes at Manhattan Central High, and helped organize Las Dos Antillas (the Two Islands), a club on Third Avenue that collected money, weapons, and medical supplies for an armed struggle.
In January 1895 Marti issued the order for an uprising, smuggling it down to Havana rolled inside a cigar. Although he was frail and ill, Marti himself headed south, ending