On New Year’s Day, 1892, the Cuban nationalist revolutionary José Martí was in Key West, Florida, delivering rousing speeches in support of Cuban independence. Martí was the latest in a 40-year line of revolutionary leaders seeking to free the island of Cuba from Spanish rule, and his political base included tens of thousands of Cuban exiles who worked in the cigar factories of Key West, Tampa, and New York, many of which were owned by Jewish tobacco magnates. Martí’s speeches in the Florida factories were typically marked by a unifying and universal appeal to all races and classes—partly because, like others before him, Martí calculated that revolution in Cuba would require the support of its enslaved Black population. “No man has any special rights because he belongs to one race or another,” Martí wrote in Patria, the newspaper of the Cuban Revolutionary Party. As early as 1891, in perhaps the most famous essay of his career, he concluded: “There are no races.” This rhetoric largely appealed to the Jews of Key West, who had recently arrived from places in Eastern Europe where they had been deemed inferior. In fact, the elaborate scene at Eduardo Gato’s Key West cigar factory where Martí spoke had been set by a Romanian Jewish businessman named Edward Steinberg. As one veteran of the revolutionary struggle recalled a decade later, Steinberg had provided beer and candy for the workers and their children in attendance and transformed the workaday factory into a dazzling reception hall, decorated with patriotic streamers, flags, portraits of Cuban heroes, and elaborate painted backdrops portraying allegorical scenes of Cuban independence.
Martí visited Key West twice more in 1892. During one of these visits, he met with leaders of the Jewish community, at Steinberg’s invitation. For Martí, this was a strategic necessity—among these men were the leaders of Key West’s growing Jewish merchant class, from whom he hoped to raise funds for his revolution. But Martí also genuinely seemed to find resonance in their life stories: In his appeal, he touched on the historic struggle of the Jews and the recent persecutions that had forced these men to flee to a speck of an island across the globe from their homes in Romania and imperial Russia, where many still had relatives, including wives and children, for whom antisemitic terror remained a fact of daily life. Martí connected these trials to the struggles of his own people, and the despotism and cruelty they suffered at the hands of their Spanish oppressors. “With all, and for the good of all” had been Martí’s rallying cry, and he now pleaded with the Jews of Key West to support the cause of liberty, not simply for Cubans, but for all people.