This volume addresses the historical question of possible Cuban annexation by the United States in terms of the proponents on each side and the practical limitations this cause faced as a workable objective. The author, Josef Opatrný, is director of the Center for Ibero-American Studies at Charles University in Prague. Apart from his specialization in Cuba, he is responsible for American history in general and that of the United States in particular. He thus brings to this volume a broad perspective, including special insights from a region of Western civilization that found itself immersed in questions of political allegiance and national self-determination during the same period featured in this volume.
Having conducted research in the United States as a Fulbright scholar and in the Cuban archives during the Cold War, Opatrný employs a wide variety of sources. For the United States, they largely include published documents and a sound selection of secondary materials, while for Cuba archival material is employed to good advantage, and the bibliography is superb.
The volume opens with an assessment of the historiography treating the annexationist movements in mid-nineteenth-century Cuba. It goes on to analyze Cuban economic and social concerns, geographic realities, and the island’s evolving colonial status. Chapters on Texas’ secession from Mexico and annexation to the United States follow. Not surprisingly, the Texas experience served as an inspiration for many Cubans who idealized the opportunities that annexation to the United States might bring. At the same time, the contrast between Texan and Cuban realities helps Opatrný explain why annexationism faced so many obstacles in Cuba. Another chapter examines the uncertainties that afflicted the Cuban plantation system during the 1840s.
Opatrný draws these several threads into a single fabric through his treatment of concrete annexationist plans and actions in both Cuba and the United States. All this is highlighted from 1848 to 1851 by the dramatic but misguided heroics of Narciso López, who would pay for his faulty political judgment before a firing squad. The volume closes with the final echoes of the noisy but always flawed annexationist movement. Cubans turned to more appealing ideals, conveyed through a growing sense of nationalist awareness; and the United States, its internal divisions inhibiting further expansion southward, prepared to test the viability of nationalism on another level.
Opatrný shows that annexationism, though it had temporary appeal for some Cubans, never enjoyed broad intellectual endorsement and won even less popular support. Annexation seemed to offer economic advantages and the hope of guaranteeing the stability of the island’s social system. But the gulf between Cuban and U.S. culture was simply too great. Nevertheless, by advocating a break from Spain, the intellectual ferment fostered by annexationism “was one of the stages on the road which led Cuban society to national emancipation” (p. 253). This ambitious volume bears witness as well to the intellectual vigor currently reemerging in Central Eastern Europe.
