The Cuban Connection: Still Strong after all these Years
St. Augustine has always had close ties to Cuba. Florida was part of the Spanish Caribbean, administered by Spain mostly through Havana, with governors, soldiers and clergy being assigned from Cuba. The city was under the bishops of Cuba for nearly two hundred years. And it is still part of the Cuban consciousness, mostly because of one man who died in 1853, Father Félix Varela. He was buried at Tolomato Cemetery in St. Augustine, and although his remains were returned to Cuba in 1911, Cubans and Cuban Americans still come to St. Augustine to honor the site. What accounts for such memory, devotion and connection?
Félix Varela lived through many changes in Spanish-speaking America. Born in Havana in 1788, he was brought as a child to St Augustine while it was still a Spanish town in Spanish lands. He returned to the prosperous and intellectually lively Cuba, was ordained in 1811 and taught at the College and Seminary of San Carlos in Havana, where he was an educational reformer and wrote against slavery. He also produced textbooks in mathematics, science and law that were used throughout Latin America.
Varela became involved in Cuban politics and was elected to represent Cuba in the Spanish Cortes, the legislature, and left Havana for Spain in 1821. But he would never see Cuba again. The Spanish king dissolved the legislature and sentenced the representatives to death, and the Cuban delegates had to flee to the United States.
Father Varela ended up in New York City, where he ministered to the arriving Irish immigrants. But New York had also had a large Cuban and Spanish exile community, so he began once again to write on philosophical and political matters affecting Cuba and the Spanish speaking world.
He published newsletters and magazines in Spanish, such as El Habanero, which was promptly banned in Cuba for its political content. He became fluent in English and produced philosophical works and opinion pieces for New York publications, and eloquently defended the Catholic population from violent mid-19th century anti-Catholicism. He assisted with the first bilingual periodical in the United States, a newsletter for young people. Varela also helped to spread new ideas to Latin America, translating into Spanish things ranging from a manual of agriculture to Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Parliamentary Procedure.
A Cuban disciple, José de la Luz y Caballero, referred to Father Varela as “the first to teach us to think,” and his former students extended his influence to new generations of Cuban reformers. Among them was José Martí, the Cuban nationalist and revolutionary leader. José Martí visited the Varela Chapel in 1892 when he was touring Florida to organize the cigar workers, and Cubans see the fact that Martí was born in 1853, the year of Félix Varela’s death, as a strong symbolic connection.
Through the work of Father Varela, St. Augustine takes its place in the Spanish speaking world. We can see this in the huge mural at the important Miami shrine of the Virgin of La Caridad de Cobre, built by Cubans in the 1970s. It shows us a cloud of faces of formative Cuban religious and political figures. And presiding over them all is Father Félix Varela, whose memory forms an enduring connection between Cuba and St Augustine.
Sources:
Antonio L. Valverde. La Muerte del Padre Varela. El Siglo XX; Havana, 1924.
José Ignacio Rodríguez. Vida del presbítero don Félix Varela. O Novo Mundo; New York, 1878.
Juan M. Navia. An Apostle for the Immigrants. Factor Press; Salisbury, MD, 2002
Joseph McCadden “The New York-to-Cuba Axis of Father Varela.” The Americas, New York, 1964, pgs. 376-92.
