Lunch & Learn: Sugar, Cigars & Revolution — The Making of Cuban New York
Historian Lisandro Pérez reconstructs New York's nineteenth-century Cuban community — the largest Latin American diaspora west of the Mississippi — using census records, vital records, and the archives of a forgotten immigrant world.
Why we picked this
New York's Cuban community pre-dates the 1959 revolution by a century, and most New Yorkers have no idea. Pérez uses the city's own archives to recover a community that shaped both Cuban independence and New York's Latin American identity — a genuinely overlooked chapter in both cities' histories.
Before Miami, before the 1959 revolution, before the diaspora communities most Americans associate with Cuban immigration, New York City was home to the largest community of Cuban origin in the United States — and one of the largest Latin American communities anywhere west of the Mississippi. This community, built by the sugar trade and sustained by Cuban independence movements throughout the nineteenth century, has been largely invisible in standard histories of both New York and Cuba. Dr. Lisandro Pérez has spent years reconstructing it.
Drawing on his book Sugar, Cigars, and Revolution: The Making of Cuban New York, Pérez uses New York’s Municipal Archives — census records, vital records, immigration files — to rebuild individual and family stories that together constitute a portrait of an immigrant community seeking education, business opportunity, and political refuge. Cuban émigrés came to New York to organize for independence, to run cigar factories, to educate their children, and to escape colonial surveillance. José Martí wrote his most important political writing here. The community’s story is inseparable from the story of Cuban nationalism itself.
The lecture is virtual and free, part of the NYC Municipal Archives Lunch & Learn series, which uses the city’s own documentary holdings as the primary source material for public history programming. For anyone who thinks of New York’s Latin American history as a twentieth-century story, this talk rewrites the timeline.