In the Spanish-speaking Caribbean at the end of the last century, while political factors were turning the islands’ histories toward divergent paths, the human factor wove a common thread that, through migration, knitted the islands closer together. Perhaps this crisscrossing of boundaries here—contrary to migration in Europe—fostered the region’s peculiar trend, a constant flow to and from the islands, described not by the word exile but rather by pilgrimage.
Brought dramatically to the fore at moments, migration throughout the Antilles has not been restricted to the faceless mass of the pauperized. Máximo Gómez, commander in chief of Cuba’s revolutionary army at the turn of the century, and the Maceo brothers, generals in that same army, were all from the Dominican Republic. Juan Rius, a general who later held important posts in the Cuban Republic, was born and raised in Puerto Rico. Eugenio María de Hostos, the famed pedagogue and sociologist, founded the first modern schools in the Dominican Republic; he is buried there, though he frequently visited Puerto Rico, where he was born. And Ramón E. Betances (1827-1898), a French-trained physician, the founder and foremost ideologist of Puerto Rico’s independence movement, was no stranger to the Dominicans’ plight in the face of Haiti’s threat of a takeover. Betances supported, as well, Cuba’s República en Armas, of which he was a delegate. Thus, a literal meaning shades the metaphor in the verses of Lola R. de Tío, one of Puerto Rico’s first poets: “Cuba y Puerto Rico son / de un pájaro las dos alas / reciben flores y balas / sobre el mismo corazón (Cuba and Puerto Rico are / the two wings of a bird / they receive bullets and flowers / to the same heart).”
Those lines ring the common chord among the six biographies, documents, and photographs in Félix Ojeda Reyes’ Peregrinos. The product of a research project at the Cuban archives under the auspices of the University of Puerto Rico, this book is first and foremost a pleasure to the eye. Glancing at the pages of this exquisitely edited and lavishly illustrated book, one senses “a view through a small crevice of time . . . like prying . . . at an album of memorabilia,” as Ramón Arbona aptly states in the introduction.
Each of the six political figures sketched in the text is introduced with a brief historical essay. The first three, Betances, Hostos, and de Tío, are well known to those acquainted with the island’s history, and scarcely add any new information. In the case of Betances, for instance, the excellent research published years ago by the late Ada Suárez remains the definitive text. The sketches of the lesser-known Rius Rivera (1848-1924), Sotero Figueroa (1851-1923), and Francisco Gonzalo Marín (1863-1898), all from Puerto Rico but identified more with Cuba, are fittingly included. Why, one may ask, does the study of those lives still hold our interest and make reading a delight, now that the dust has settled on those other interpretations of Caribbean history from the pre-perestroika era?
