As a Student Historian at the New York Historical, I was given the opportunity to select a primary source to craft a digital history project around. In a group of five students, we studied the activities of La Liga de Las Hijas de Cuba. I was immediately interested in this source, because it contained just one short article and one drawing of the women, and I quickly understood that this article’s brief content represented how the women were often overshadowed in the busy reformist community of late 1800s New York. La Liga had to fight for the right to be recognized and to allow their political beliefs to be heard, and I wanted to take the opportunity to continue amplifying their story.
Founded in January of 1869, by Emilia Casanova de Villaverde, La Liga de Las Hijas de Cuba was the first political organization led by Cuban women. During the Reconstruction, many Americans took advantage of the flourishing culture of social change and acceptance. The Reconstruction culture brought change to all aspects of society–giving women increased freedoms, giving African Americans political rights and agency over their lives, but many leaders of the Reconstruction encouraged Americans to be accepting of all kinds of diversity–including for immigrants or different religions. The cultural changes brought by the Reconstruction had international impacts. It was akin to a secondary Revolution, showing the world that America was embracing freedom for all its citizens, and encouraging other oppressed people to fight for their own freedoms.
This renewed demand for independence was felt especially in Cuba, where the Cubans had been fighting for independence from Spanish colonial rule for years in what became known as the Ten Years’ War, or the first Cuban war of Independence. They wanted autonomy, the right to abolish slavery, and freedom from Spain’s harsh taxes. Spain, a weakening superpower, saw Cuba as an essential colony to retain its global influence and wealth. As the fighting continued, many lower class Cubans fought in the war, while the elite fled the country–many coming to New York, a hub of reformist thought and activism.
Emilia Casanova, from the elite Casanova family, moved to New York in 1852, but she clung to her dream of Cuban independence. From a young age, she’d seen her father and brothers go to war, and she wanted to support her country and family, even though women were not allowed ot fight. In New York, she supported her father in his activist work, helping to smuggle supplies from the Casanova mansion in the South Bronx to Cuba, and she was very involved with the New York Cuban community’s activist work. All of the Cuban revolutionary organizations in New York, the largest of which was the Junta Republicana de Cuba, allowed membership to men only. Casanova was wealthy, well educated, and deeply passionate about Cuban independence–so she established her own organization.
La Liga de Hijas de Cuba represented the Cuban women who equally valued Cuban independence but weren’t allowed to participate like the men were. New York had a heightened population of Cuban women because many men sent their wives and children to be protected while the remained in Cuba to fight or contribute to the war effort. Census records documented the men who owned property, but didn’t always account for the women living in New York as well. Nevertheless, records of La Liga’s meetings and activity demonstrate the presence and impact of Cuban ladies in New York.
After their establishment in January of 1869, La Liga immediately set to work organizing fundraisers and events to raise money and awareness for the Cuban independence cause. They held fairs at well respected locations and showrooms, such as Steinway Hall and Fifth Avenue Hall, where patrons paid for tickets to see renowned orchestras and singers, or purchased goods for auction. La Liga sent the profits to the Cuban president, and even organized connections with supportive Europeans so they could send medical aid to Cuban families.
All the leaders of La Liga de Las Hijas de Cuba were women, and this gave Cuban women a political platform they’d never had before, to fight for their country and the unchecked freedom they thought Cuba deserved. Many of the wealthy Cuban men living in New York at the time, particularly those in the Junta, were Aldamistas, who believed in Cuba making a deal with Spain where they would gain autonomy but remain one of Spain’s colonies. La Liga were Quesadistas, who supported the Cuban General Quesada and believed the Cubans should fight relentlessly for complete independence from Spain. Emilia felt very strongly about this, and she often led the charge to criticize the Aldamistas. She was once quoted in a Chicago Tribune article to have criticized elite New York Cuban men who promenade and write letters instead of fighting the war, and she instead offered to train the women of La Liga to fight so they could drive the Spaniards away themselves.
La Liga de Las Hijas de Cuba was most active in New York from 1869 until Emilia Casanova’s death in 1897. Their work gave voice to Cuban women who would have otherwise never been abel to take action to support Cuba’s independence, and it diversified the New York Cuban resistance movement. Before La Liga’s work began, it was dominated by wealthy reformist men who wanted to compromise with Spain while their poorer comrades had spent years dying in order to establish Cuba as its own nation and abolish slavery. La Liga was able to garner support for the Quesadista cause, the purer form of the revolutionary movement that was dedicated to complete freedom even though it required much greater sacrifice.
While the Cubans didn’t defeat the Spanish in the Ten Years’ War, and their freedom only came decades later, with great support from America in the Spanish-American war, it was La Ligas’ beliefs of committing completely to the cause, making great sacrifices, and doing everything possible to support those fighting that ultimately brought Cuba its freedom from Spanish rule.
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