There is no shortage of information about Cuba in the 20th century up to the present, especially regarding the post-Revolution years. If you want on-the-ground impressions of the post-independence, turn of the century era, fewer options exist. One source of information might be Irene A. Wright, a journalist and historian who lived on the island in the 1910s. Her first book, Cuba, is more or less a travelogue around the former Spanish colony. It isn’t a book of great insight though.
Wright starts off the book in Havana, the capital city of Cuba, where she worked several years for an American news agency. She begins by describing some landmarks and tourist sights, providing background historical information about each one. This could have been more interesting, but her writing style is like what you would find in a standard travel guide. By that I mean she doesn’t write as well as a Lonely Planet writer would. For some odd reason, the chapter on tourist attractions ends with a long divergence into the subject of Cuban funerals. The subject might be of interest to social scientists or travelers who are less interested in tourism and more interested in cultural experiences. This is actually one of the most interesting parts of the book. But it is certainly misplaced in a chapter on tourist sights. This book overall is poorly organized, especially in its paragraphing.
Wright goes slightly deeper as she writes about Havana. This is mostly a written description of a city map that doesn’t give a sense of what it feels like to be there. She tries a couple times though. One passage is about the evening corso and concerts in a city park. Another part is about carnival when the streets fill with masked revelers. Her description, however, is shallow and patronizing. Rather than participating in the celebration, she stands aloof on the sidelines and watches as if she is too proper to participate. She writes about carnival as though it is a crowd of drunken simpletons having fun by throwing paper streamers at each other. She never takes into consideration what this might mean for the participants.
Her other assessments of Havana’s population aren’t any better. Her opinion of the people are that they are nice and generous, but not very bright. Of course, she doesn’t go into great detail about why this is so. And her assessment of who is Cuban is a bit off too. I don’t know the actual demographic breakdown of Cuba in the 1910s, but I do know the population had a visibly large Afro-Cuban population. But Wrights statistics of Cuban citizens only account for the white population as if the Afro-Cubans are stateless people who just happen to be there for some inexplicable reason.
Throughout the book, Wright barely ever mentions Afro-Cuban people. They are strangely absent in the same way they are absent from American TV shows like Leave It to Beaver where one or two of them might pop into view for a brief moment.
There is one exception though when she gets taken to a Santeria or Nanigo ceremony. If my information is correct, this is the first written account in history of an African diaspora religious ceremony in Cuba. The description is basic though and doesn’t give any real insight. She also conflates Santeria with Abakua which are actually two different practices, but she doesn’t investigate deeply enough to understand that. For her it’s all just some exotic entertainment like something you’d see at Disneyworld. The urban legend that Abakua societies perform human sacrifices also gets mentioned even though that is something that has been disproven long ago. Those were actually rumors spread by colonial Spanish police who wanted to destroy the Abakua societies for being pro-inedepndence. Wright wouldn’t have known that in her time however.
The strongest part of this book is the evaluation of Cuban politics at that time. The 19th century in was marked by slave rebellions and the Wars of Independence sparked by Jose Marti. In the 1890s, the United States sent troops to Cuba during the Spanish-American War fought in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. After Cuba’s liberation and granting of statehood, the American government stayed in Havana to prop up a national government. After writing the contentious Platt Amendment into Cuba’s constitution, granting America the right to intervene in Cuban politics at will, the American diplomats returned to the North, leaving Cuba to its own affairs. The problem was that the Cuban government attracted politicians who were more concerned with graft and corruption than they were in governing the country. What little infrastructure that got built in Cuba was in the hands of American and European businessmen who had vested interests in making money as opposed to developing the nation. Wright’s assessment of this dilemma is verifiable in other histories of Cuba.
After time spent in Havana, Wright travels by boat around the west coast of the island and onwards to the Isle of Pines. Her descriptions f the beaches and coves along with the interior lands are about what you would expect from tropical Caribbean islands. There are a couple stories about pirates using the Cuban coast for their lairs and folkloric hunts for buried treasure. There is also a brief mention of the coral reef that impeded John F. Kennedy’s disastrous failed Bay of Pigs invasion in the 1960s. If only the CIA knew what other people knew, history would have been a lot different. In the lands beyond the coast, Wright comments more about farming than she does the jungle and natural vegetation. This is somewhat interesting, but not enough to carry the whole book.
Wright’s travels along the coast going east and back west along the southern edge are more of the same. She says little about the sugarcane and tobacco plantations that made Cuba so famous. Instead she writes about the citrus farms, emphasizing those that grow grapefruit and lemons. Most of the farmers she writes about are white Americans, Canadians, or Europeans. Cuban farmers are almost completely absent from the narrative and when they do appear, it is mostly to comment on how poor they are. As patronizing to Cubans as that might be, she isn’t without sympathy for them. She uses the poverty of the farmers to make an argument that Cuba needs to open up to international markets in order to thrive economically. That doesn’t necessarily sound bad on the surface, but what she is actually arguing is that the USA should colonize or annex Cuba for the benefit of the American food industry. She explicitly names the United Fruit Company in her sales pitch, one of the most destructive American corporations to ever do business in Latin America. Most of the second half of the book reads like a solicitation to American land buyers and investors. She writes like Cuba is a ripe fruit ready for the picking by wealthier nations. That might not have seemed so bad in her time, but with hindsight it certainly was a dangerous idea. She is right that Cuba got off to a bad start politically and economically, but her solution is nothing but short sighted and naive considering that Cuba was an emerging nation when she was there and what came later.
The last half of the book is dull. The writing is so monotonous that every town, village, city, and jungle all sound about the same. She uses the same language to describe different places and that doesn’t make for good reading.
Irene A. Wright’s Cuba has some high points, but ultimately is a lifeless book. The author fails to capture the heart and soul of the island and its people. It is of historical importance though since Cuba is the first book written in English about this Latin American nation located just ninety miles south of Miami. I suppose that makes her the first woman to write about Cuba too. That could be a source of pride for feminists even though her writing sucks. Beyond this, Wright went on to write the first comprehensive book on the history of Cuba in any language and it was all based on bone fide methods of historical research, or at least whatever those methods were in her time. This book isn’t great but it is of historical importance. At least it deserves some credit for that.
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