Overcoming the Other America: José Martí's Immanent Critique of the Unionist Paradigm

This article offers a new interpretation of the Cuban intellectual José Martí's international political thought. It argues that Martí's analysis of early US imperialism and call for Spanish American unity are best understood as an immanent critique of the “unionist paradigm,” a tradition of international political thought that originated in the American independence movements. Martí recognized the impediments that racism had placed in the way of both US and Spanish American efforts to stabilize the hemisphere's republics by uniting them under regional institutions. He argued that, in his own time, Anglo-Saxon supremacism had deprived US-led Pan-Americanism of all legitimacy, causing a crisis of international political order in the Americas. In the context of this crisis, he developed a revised, antiracist unionism that, he argued, would free Spanish America's republics from imperial aggression and interstate conflicts, making the region a global model of stable and inclusive self-rule.

An Early Power-Sharing Regime: The Alternativa System in Spanish Colonial America

The alternativa system in Spanish American religious orders was an early example of deliberate electoral engineering to address the problem of social division. It was subject to criticism, however, for stealing voters’ freedom, ignoring the rights of candidates, and restricting access to competent officeholders. Moreover, it often gave disproportionate power to a minority faction. Hence, the alternativa remained, at best, an expedient, short-term solution to the problem of factionalism. Examining the canonists’ debate about the alternativa is instructive because it reveals the darker moral side of power-sharing regimes whenever and wherever they occur.

The Situation of Puerto Rico in the First Half of the 20th Century

After 390 years of Spanish colonialism, Puerto Rico was ceded by Spain to the United States, as a result of the Spanish-American War and the Treaty of Paris. At the dawn of the 20th century, the situation on the Island was one of extreme poverty, high unemployment, and widespread illiteracy. Federal programs alleviated the situation on the Island but began to institutionalize a major problem: the evil of passively waiting for economic aid from abroad, instead of seeking to solve the problems by its own initiative.

EMIRO MARTÍNEZ-OSORIO. Authority, Piracy, and Captivity in Colonial Spanish American Writing: Juan de Castellanos’s Elegies of Illustrious Men of the Indies. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2016. xxxix + 155 pp.

Reseña de Authority, Piracy, and Captivity in Colonial Spanish American Writing: Juan de Castellanos’s Elegies of Illustrious Men of the Indies de Emiro Martínez-Osorio.

Communicating an Empire and Its Many Worlds: Spanish American Mail, Logistics, and Postal Agents, 1492–1620

This article examines the principles underlying Spanish American mail during the government of the first Hapsburgs. I propose that this mail system, in which official and unofficial postal services coexisted, allowed for an intense communicational experience; rather than restricting correspondence, mail circulated at unprecedented levels. To understand this system's rationale I focus on the figure of the correos mayores, who were responsible for the distribution of official information (or information of interest to the crown) within certain Spanish American cities. Using sources in American and European archives, I question the premise that Spanish American communication was chaotic during this period. I also argue that the exceptional circulation of mail within Spanish America and overseas during the sixteenth century is essential for understanding European expansion and the early modern world.

MILES SHEROVER AS A SALES AGENT OF REPUBLICAN SPAIN IN THE UNITED STATES IN 1937-1938

The article describes the activities of Miles Sherover, an American entrepreneur, president of the Hanover Sales Corporation, who served as a sales agent of the Spanish Republic in the United States in 1937-1938. During the study period, M. Sherover, being authorized by the Government of the Second Republic, participated in a number of initiatives of the leadership of the Spanish Republic, such as Spanish-American negotiations on the security of the finances and property of American companies in Spain and the sale of silver reserves of the Bank of Spain to the United States in order to pay for the purchase of military equipment, civilian goods and raw materials with the proceeds. In addition to being as a middleman between the Spanish Republic and the United States in the trade, M. Sherover was actively engaged in political activities, the consequences of which discredited the Embassy of the Republic in Washington, as the Spanish Ambassador Fernando de los Rios, who was wary of the entrepreneur, regularly reported to the Prime Minister of the Spanish Republic Juan Negrin and Foreign Minister Julio Alvarez del Vayo. In general, the activities of Miles Sherover were contradictory: in order to help the Second Republic, he was engaged not only in issues of Spanish-American trade during the war, but also was carried out active political activities that went beyond his official powers and put the diplomacy of the Second Republic in the United States in a difficult position

The Caribbean, Carlos Finlay, Walter Reed, and Serendipity

This chapter reviews the role of expanding sugarcane plantations throughout the Caribbean in the movement of slaves, mosquitoes and disease, as world empires jockeyed for dominance in world sugar markets. It relates how increased sugarcane production and exports to Europe led to increased importation of slaves to work the fields. As the African embarkation point of slaves moved north to the Slave Coast, yellow fever and the mosquito Aedes aegypti came into play, though when England banned slaveholding, sugar production shifted to the Spanish colonies of Puerto Rico and Cuba. The brief Spanish-American War of 1898, over control of Cuba, cemented the fame of Colonel Theodore Roosevelt but resulted in more deaths from yellow fever than combat, with the outbreak continuing during the post-war occupation of Cuba. Serendipity played a significant role in the subsequent discovery of the cause of the disease, connecting the Yellow Fever Commission, led by Major Walter Reed, with Cuban physician, Dr. Carlos Finlay, whose early experiments pointed to mosquitos and others while a series of experiments by Reed's team showed Aedes aegypti was the vector.

William Crawford Gorgas and the Panama Canal

This chapter relates how yellow fever continued to cause casualties during the US occupation after the Spanish-American War ended and how Major William Crawford Gorgas created a successful strategy to eliminate the disease from Cuba by attacking mosquito breeding sites. It goes on to tell the story of the plan to link the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, proposed earlier that century, with the Panama Railroad transporting military goods and soldiers, plus those seeking gold in California. A canal was proposed, but the first, French effort to build it cost hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of workers’ lives lost before capitulating to yellow fever in 1889. Subsequent US construction, begun in 1904, was soon threatened by disease. When Colonel Gorgas brought his yellow fever control plan to Panama he faced criticism from his superiors but gained the support of President Theodore Roosevelt. The chapter relates how his plan, though seemingly improbable, worked, defeating yellow fever, saving countless lives, and allowing the completion of the canal.