By Dr. José Ramón Cabañas on on March 25, 2025
Paper presented at the International Seminar on Cultural Diplomacy, organized by the Instituto Superior de Relaciones Internacionales “Raúl Roa García”, ISRI, Havana, March 25-27, 2025.
Introduction
Cultural diplomacy is another conventional term used within the framework of international relations and essentially refers to the promotion and development of cultural links between actors, for the growth of mutual official relations, or even in the multilateral sphere.
While there are countless precedents for the use of such an instrument to achieve these objectives, it is only in the last two decades that a group of foreign ministries have incorporated into their structures and budgets the attention to and association with non-state actors in their respective societies in a structured and holistic way, to satisfy foreign policy projections. From this exercise, other denominations have emerged, such as scientific, religious or sports diplomacy.
The frequent organization of major arts festivals, the promotion of literary competitions, film forums, the exchange of scholarships for new talent, the relationship between community cultural bearers and many other projects, today serve to convey messages and specify actions that bring nations closer together, create new spaces of common interest, influence public opinion.
In some cases the main effort has been directed at counterparts with a national profile, but there are countries that have managed to set objectives for regions and even for specific communities of that counterpart where they intend to open up new spaces or expand the existing relationship.
Within what we assume to be cultural diplomacy there are at least two components that cannot be ignored when setting goals: the pre-existing historical links between the parties and the human exchange that may have taken place in previous years.
In the specific case of what could be understood as cultural diplomacy efforts between Cuba and the United States, it would be useful to delve deeper into the establishment of the earliest links between the island and the southern part of that country, which created ties that formed the basis of a political expression that continues to this day.
Development
If you ask anyone where the largest Cuban cultural presence is in the United States, a good number of answers would point to southeastern Florida and, in particular, to the city of Miami (recognized only in 1896 with 300 inhabitants). However, this criterion excludes the description of the first southern areas of Cuban presence in that country, long before the second half of the 19th century.
The first fact to bear in mind in this historical reconstruction is the colonial past of certain territories such as Florida itself, under Spanish rule, and Louisiana, under French sovereignty.
In the first case, the movement of people between the Caribbean island and the peninsula did not take place between two different nations but between colonial territories subject to the same crown, until the acquisition of Florida by the US authorities through a symbolic purchase in 1819.
It was that early migration, largely originating among Cubans fighting for the independence of their country that explains why when the first mayor of Key West was elected in 1876, it was Carlos Manuel de Céspedes (son) who was proclaimed. Five years earlier the San Carlos Patriotic and Teaching Institute had been created on this small island as a space for the promotion of Cuban culture and knowledge.
Cuban migrants who returned to Havana from Key West, especially after the Great Depression, settled mainly in the area of what is now known as the Centro Habana municipality, in the country’s capital, in an area locally known as El Cayo. They even reproduced the façade of the San Carlos Institute in Key West, built in 1922, as part of their architecture.
An ailing José Martí arrived in Key West at the end of 1891 to speak to the majority of its 18,000 inhabitants, who listened in total silence to a speech in which he explained the reasons for independence, as a prelude to the creation of the Cuban Revolutionary Party a few weeks later.
Martí went up to the balcony of a restaurant bar known as La Te Da, from where he delivered his words of thanks and respect. It was the same place from which the local mayor, Teri Johnston, declared Cuba and Key West sister islands in 2019, a status that was ratified in 2021.
Other deep-rooted Cuban links also remain in Key West, such as the Mambi cemetery, where the remains of several independence fighters lie and are honored, as well as the original house where the Cuban consulate that offered services to fellow countrymen resided for many years.
Traveling further north through western (and not eastern) Florida, Cubans arrived from the island and from Cayo to settle from 1830 onwards in the area that would later become known as Pinellas County, where two important urban centers would grow: St. Petersburg and Tampa.
Towards the end of the 19th century, the arrival and settlement there of the businessman of Spanish origin, naturalized Cuban, Vicente Martínez Ybor, was an additional factor in attracting the Cuban workforce to the tobacco industry and a political center for confrontation with the Spanish authorities.
In what eventually became known as Ybor City, which was incorporated into the Tampa metropolitan area, the memories of José Martí’s meetings with the tobacco workers are still cherished. A park bearing his name is preserved there, on the site of the guest house run by the Cubans Ruperto and Paulina Pedroso, who watched over the sleep of the Cuban hero during his stay.
José Martí arrived in Tampa for the first time on November 25, 1891, at the invitation of Néstor Carbonell, who had been a patriot who participated in the Ten Years’ War and who had lived in that city since 1889. On the 26th he was introduced at the Ignacio Agramonte Club, where he gave his first speech. On the 27th he also spoke at the Cuban Patriotic League and on the same day he founded the Instruction League to contribute to education and teaching among Cubans, similar to the one that existed at that time in New York. (Rodríguez 2003)
The Cuban influence is surprising, seen in murals that are still preserved, such as the one of General Antonio Maceo y Grajales, revered by Cubans, but with no direct link to the place, or in street names that coincide with Cuban provinces such as Matanzas.
The Cubans who worked in Mr. Martínez Ybor’s companies devised a community system for family medical care, whereby each employee contributed a minimum portion of their income to a common fund that guaranteed primary health care. It was finally established in 1886 under the name Sociedad Benéfica (Charitable Society). This was one of the antecedents of what later became known in socialist Cuba as the family doctor and nurse service.
The first school in Ybor City was established and run by Carlos Zequeira, a Cuban who had emigrated from Cuba years before and settled in Baltimore. By the end of 1886, another Cuban, Inez Sainz de la Pena, had opened a second school in her own home. For several years these were the only two schools dedicated to teaching the children of Cuban cigar makers. (Rodríguez 2003)
In 1922 a cigar maker’s reader, Victoriano Mateiga, founded a weekly newspaper called La Gaceta, the only trilingual publication (English-Spanish-Italian) in the United States, which is still published today. In its publications and archives, La Gaceta treasures stories and key data on the presence of Cubans in that area of Florida. In 2001, Cubans living in Tampa formed the Foundation for a Responsible Policy toward Cuba, which has sponsored more than a hundred group trips of local personalities to the Cuban capital.
Citing the issues shared between St. Petersburg and Havana, such as the preservation of coastal life and culture, the then mayor of the Florida city Rick Kriseman visited Cuba in 2016 and 2019, deploying an intense campaign aimed at showing willingness to host a Cuban consulate in his area, with a view to offering services to a community of 90,000 people of Cuban origin living there.
Further north, in Cooper Riverside Park in Mobile, Alabama, there has been a bronze statue of the city’s founder, the Frenchman Perre Le Moyne d’Iberville, since 2002, looking towards the city of Havana. It is a reproduction of another one that exists on the Malecón in the Cuban capital, very close to where d’Iberville’s remains lie.
Spanish attempts to colonize Mobile Bay were repeated from Havana until finally Juan de Jordán Reina founded Pensacola in 1698. In reaction to Spanish advances in the area, Louis XIV sent d’Iberville, who took up residence and founded the city of Mobile in 1702 as the capital of French Louisiana. Four years later the senior French officer traveled to Havana in search of support to confront the British presence in the Carolinas, but he contracted yellow fever and died there. His remains lie just in front of the Plaza de Armas in Havana, with an almost exact replica in the heart of New Orleans.
From then on, an intense exchange of products began between the two parties, which led to the port of Mobile becoming Cuba’s main trading partner in the southern United States during the pre-revolutionary era. cotton, wood, paper and rice arrived from Mobile, while Cuba sent copper, salt, nickel, sugar and tobacco, in many cases in the form of barter, without the use of money. Mobile was also the transit port for a large number of US cattle heading south.
But this was not by far the main import arriving in Cuba from Mobile. Spring Hill College, the Cubans Nemesio and Ernesto Guillo, together with their friend Enrique Porto, began to familiarize themselves with the game of baseball. Nemesio first brought the new sport to the Vedado neighborhood of Havana and later founded the Habana Baseball Club. (Schrubbe, 2013)
Towards the end of the century, the fight against yellow fever brought scientists from both sides together. Dr. William Crawford Gorgas traveled to Havana to work with the eminent Carlos J. Finlay, who helped eradicate the disease in both cities. From the beginning of the 20th century, Havana became a favorite tourist destination for many inhabitants of the southern part of the state of Alabama, especially for weddings and honeymoons.
These are just some of the reasons why elected officials from Mobile and local citizens were the first Americans to propose a “sister cities” agreement with Havana. From that action in 1993, the Mobile-Habana Society was created to promote relations between the two cities.
Despite the restrictions imposed on Cuba by the government of George W. Bush, the Fourth National Summit on Cuba was held at the Mobile Convention Center in 2005.
The city’s mayor, Sandy Stimpson, visited Havana in May 2016, along with a delegation of local personalities to explore business opportunities in agriculture, trade, port relations and others.
Although there is almost the same passion for Mardi Gras in both Mobile (Alabama) and New Orleans (Louisiana), this carnival expression has had a greater presence in the development of the links between Louisiana and Cuba.
The origins of Mardi Gras and the Cuban carnival are completely different, although they have points of connection that have to do with religious beliefs, but above all with the cultural presence of people of African descent.
As for the religious issue, at least as far as Christianity is concerned, with the change of sovereignty over Louisiana from France to Spain (1763) there was also a change of ecclesiastical jurisdiction and the province came to be supervised by the bishop of Santiago de Cuba, Reverend James José de Echevarría. Later, in 1787, Louisiana became part of the diocese of Havana. In 1793, when the creation of the diocese of San Luis de New Orleans was decided, its first bishop was Luis Peñalver y Cárdenas, who had been born and ordained in Havana (Points, 1911).
Arrival celebrations in both New Orleans and Cuba were established over the years by communities, societies and brotherhoods that decided on their own rhythms, costumes, processions and symbols. In the US city these groups are now called krewes.
At least one of them, of African descent and called the Zulu Krewe, organizes its procession and chooses a sound very similar to that of Cuban comparsas, in particular the Conga de los Hoyos, from Santiago de Cuba.
These and other details were kept in mind by the organizers of the 2017 New Orleans Jazz Festival, the most popular in the United States, when they received a delegation of 150 artists from Cuba as the guest country, including the aforementioned musicians from Santiago. It was impressive to see the identity-related reaction of those present to a sound that was supposedly “foreign”, but at the same time very close to the local timbres.
The bibliography that has studied the jazz relationship between Cuba, the Southern United States and New York is endless. The common thread in most research places the origins of the genre in New Orleans at the end of the 19th century, with an expression in Cuba (Banda Hermanos Castro) in the second decade of the 20th century, at the same time as it made its appearance in the cultural industry of New York. In parallel, the emergence of Latin Jazz is explained as a re-export to the USA, or as a transformation from within urban or rural centers with a greater presence of the Latin population.
However, Cuban citizens living in New Orleans who belong to the organization INCUBASO have been investigating for years the possible influence that the presence of the so-called 9th Regiment of the Immunes[1] of that city, composed almost entirely of people of African descent, may have had on the roots of the emergence of Jazz as part of the troops that participated in the Spanish-Cuban-American War and who remained in the vicinity of Santiago de Cuba from August 22, 1898 until April 26 of the following year (Cunningham 2001). It is believed that these soldiers, among whom there were several professional musicians, were strongly influenced by the local sounds which, on their return, would have influenced the final product called Jazz.
In any case, musicians from both cities have maintained a permanent exchange for years, which has enriched the genre and has taken place both at the Preservation Hall in the French Quarter of New Orleans and at the Jazz Plaza Festivals in Havana and other venues. Artists of Cuban origin living in the United States such as Arturo O’Farrill (New York), Nachito Herrera (Minneapolis), or Yosvany Terry (Harvard University) are at the center of frequent exchanges of young students of the genre between the two countries.
Jazz accompanied the resumption of direct flights between New Orleans and Havana on March 14, 2015, as well as the celebrations for the signing of an MOU between the port authority of that city and the Port of Mariel in Cuba in October 2016, as well as the commemoration of the 300th anniversary of the founding of the city to which Cuba was a guest country.
For many cultural and historical reasons, New Orleans was the only foreign city to sign a twinning agreement with the City of Havana during the celebrations for the 500th anniversary of the latter’s founding in November 2019.
Unlike Key West, Tampa, St. Petersburg, or Mobile, in the case of New Orleans, the cultural exchange with Cuba is complemented by the flow that Tulane University has sustained for years with Cuban counterparts, which has allowed students and professors from a diversity of backgrounds to form their own opinion of the dynamics of the island.
Conclusions
Taking into account the complexity of the US political system, the cultural diplomacy actions that are devised must take into account a plurality of actors that manifest themselves at the state and local level, which sometimes have the capacity to carry out projects in a more sustainable way than federal institutions.
In several localities in the South of the country there are historical links with Cuba that range from cultural, commercial and sporting manifestations to the presence of Cuban citizens, who constitute an irreplaceable support for developing actions that allow for a greater rapprochement between the two peoples.
In all the cases referred to in this article (Key West, St. Petersburg, Tampa, Mobile, New Orleans), these historical links have influenced the position that local personalities and political leaders have taken on Cuban issues over the years.
The conditions are in place to articulate, in the medium and long term, cultural projects that solidify and expand relations with these counterparts in a sustainable and economically viable way over time, regardless of changes in the political leanings of the governments elected at the national level.
Bibliography
Cunningham, Roger D.; The Black “Immune” Regiments in the Spanish-American War, The Army Historical Foundation (2001) https://armyhistory.org/the-black-immune-regiments-in-the-spanish-american-war/
Points, Marie Louise (1911), New Orleans, The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 11, New York, Robert Appleton Company, transcribed by New Advent, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11005b.htm; accessed January 2025.
Rodríguez, Miriam; Los cubanos en Tampa: cultura y costumbres; Biblioteca Virtual CLACSO; April 20003; http://bibliotecavirtual.clacso.org.ar/Cuba/cemi-uh/20120821042349/tampa.pdf; accessed in December 2024.
Schrubbe, Georgia; Our Cuban Connection; Mobile Bay; May 17, 2013; https://mobilebaymag.com/our-cuban-connection/; accessed January 2025.
[1]The regiments formed basically by people of African descent to participate in the confrontation with the Spanish troops and subsequent occupation of Cuba in 1898 were called Immune, under the assumption that they would be less likely to be infected with tropical diseases. However, most of the highest positions were held by white officers.
Dr C. José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez is an official with 37 years of experience in the Cuban diplomatic service. In the internal service he has been Deputy Director for the USA and Canada, Director of Consular Affairs and Cubans Living Abroad, Director of Document Management and Vice-Minister. He is the current director of the Center for Investigation of International Politics (CIPI)
[1]The regiments formed basically by people of African descent to participate in the confrontation with the Spanish troops and subsequent occupation of Cuba in 1898 were called Immune, under the assumption that they would be less likely to be infected with tropical diseases. However, most of the highest positions were held by white officers.
Source: CIPI, unofficial translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English