The Maquinistas in Cuba

Abstract

Cuba would have been unexpectedly familiar to the maquinistas. Images of the West Indies had already become firmly engrained in popular perceptions and were playing an important part in the development of domestic politics within the metropolitan nations. Trans-Atlantic journeys were becoming a commonplace of European and American literature, with the accounts made by Europeans and North Americans following visits to Latin America and the Caribbean becoming popular in the mid-nineteenth century.¹ The descriptions made by such writers as Alexander von Humboldt, who traveled around South America and the Caribbean in the early nineteenth century, and the numerous travelers who followed his example effected a “reinvention of America” in the popular mind.² Cuba was on the tour circuit for performers from Europe and the United States. In November 1839, a British magician and ventriloquist Mr. Sutton, boasting of having performed before Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace, held a number of performances at the Teatro del Diorama in Havana. Foreign residents in the audience could afterward even enjoy a glass of their favorite beverage from back home: “large quantities of ale and beer are imported from Great Britain of which articles the consumption is enormous”; and one of the most important French imports was of fine wines.³