To Cuba and Back
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This book offers a vivid, firsthand account of 19th-century Cuba that combines travel writing with incisive social and political analysis, making it essential for understanding the roots of colonial exploitation and racial injustice.
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Book Summary
Richard Henry Dana Jr. recounts his 1859 voyage to Cuba, blending travelogue with sharp social critique. Through observations of Havana's streets, plantations, and institutions, he exposes the brutal realities of Spanish colonial rule, slavery, and economic exploitation, contrasting them with American ideals.
The narrative begins with Dana's departure from New York aboard the steamship Cahawba, detailing the voyage across the Gulf Stream and his arrival in Havana. Over several chapters, he describes the city's architecture, social customs, and daily life, including visits to a slave market, a Coolie market, and a sugar plantation. Dana attends mass at the Cathedral, dines with the Bishop of Havana, and explores the outskirts of the city. He provides extensive analysis of Cuba's political condition under martial law, the decline of the Catholic Church, and the brutal institution of slavery, including the importation of Chinese laborers. The book culminates in his departure and return to New York, where he reflects on the stark contrasts between the two societies. Throughout, Dana uses his journey as a lens to critique despotism, racial hierarchy, and economic exploitation, while pondering Cuba's uncertain future regarding independence, annexation, or continued Spanish rule.
Reading guide
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Character guides, themes, chapter companions — plus Character Web, narrative arc, and theme heatmap teasers that unlock fully beside the text in BetterReads.
Narrative arc
Story tension across the book.
Unknown Narrator
He arrives from a New York midwinter into Cuban heat, recording railroad stations, cane fields, and the cocoa groves with a naturalist's patience. Yet his real subject is government: whether popular self-rule is a right or a faculty, and whether Cubans can govern themselves at all. That tension between wonder and skepticism shapes every plantation visit and political aside in the book's central chapters.
The Master
He belongs to the planter class whose scattered, isolated life the narrator says makes public schooling nearly impossible. Around him, sugar and molasses flow toward Havana while the people who produce them remain outside any accounting of rights. His presence forces the narrator's abstract questions about government down to the concrete ground of labor and ownership.
Father Antonio Cabre
He moves through the narrator's Cuban days as a representative of the Church in a society the narrator describes as politically and intellectually stagnant. Young for his office, he embodies an institution that outlasts regimes yet rarely challenges them. His exchanges with the narrator quietly measure the distance between moral teaching and colonial practice.
Coolies
They appear in the narrator's plantation statistics alongside hundreds of enslaved people, a second stream of bound workers feeding the sugar economy. Their arrival signals that Cuban planters were already diversifying coercion as the slave trade came under pressure. For the narrator, they complicate any simple moral ledger of the island's wealth.
Mr. Theodore Parker
An American abolitionist and intellectual referenced in the narrative.
The Young Captain
He holds the deck while the narrator observes, a working counterpart to the traveler's detached curiosity. Youth and command sit uneasily together in him, and the narrator's eye lingers on how responsibility sits on someone so young. He anchors the seaward half of the journey before Cuba's plantations take over the book's attention.
Colonial Oppression and Despotism
The book extensively details the absolute political control Spain exerts over Cuba, including martial law, censorship, lack of representation, and the arbitrary power of the Captain-General to banish or imprison anyone.
Slavery and Racial Hierarchy
Dana provides a stark examination of the institution of slavery in Cuba, describing the brutal conditions of plantation labor, the legal and social status of slaves and free blacks, and the racial divisions that underpin the entire society.
Economic Exploitation and Sugar Monoculture
The narrative highlights how Cuba's economy is dominated by sugar production for export, with enormous wealth generated for a few while the island is heavily taxed by Spain and lacks industrial or intellectual diversity.
Cultural Contrast Between North and South
Dana constantly compares the tropical, Spanish-colonial world of Cuba with the industrial, democratic, and Protestant culture of the United States, particularly New England, emphasizing differences in governance, religion, and social habits.