The Key West – Havana Legacy

Across the Straits of Florida, with their privileged bays, strategic value and shared historical destinies, stand two cities: Havana and Key West. The capital of Cuba and the southernmost key of the United States are only 90 miles apart, much closer than the 154 miles that separate Miami from Key West.

The Gulf Stream, a gigantic river, runs through the Straits linking the New World to the Old, uniting rather than separating Havana and Key West. Connecting the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf Stream served for centuries as the route for the Spanish fleet that brought riches and peoples from all of Spanish America to Havana harbor and then to Europe. Its warm waters made vast European regions habitable, while carrying microscopic plankton in its currents. This provided plentiful nourishment for polyps, the coralline carnivorous animals that produce the limestone from which Key West was formed. Key West is indeed one of the most extensive coral reef barriers in the world.

Unlike Havana, Key West remained uninhabited for centuries due to, among other reasons, the lack of drinking water. With an abundance of fish, chelonians and mollusks in its waters, Key West became a place of reference and for visits from many other places, including the Bahamas and Cuba. Other Florida Keys shared in this bountiful and productive commercial exchange with Havana, a principal market dating back to the seventeenth century.

The coral reef and its risky waters facilitated another lucrative business that lasted for centuries: wreckers and pirates who fostered shipwrecks or waited in hiding for conditions conducive for them. Often, the crew paid with their lives and the cargo was sold at public auction at Havana’s harbor. The maritime town of Regla was also, along with Key West, a shelter for smugglers, wreckers, pro-slavery traders and every unscrupulous risk taker eager for easy bounty. This situation lasted until 1821, the year eastern Florida was incorporated into the United States and a naval station was established in Key West. This station was responsible for clearing the sea of pirates, leading to the decline of men like Jean Laffite and his famous hiding place at Barataria. During the Civil War, the Key West naval station served as an effective outpost for the Union. It also serviced the American troops that landed in Cuba in 1898 as well as antisubmarine operations during the First and Second World Wars. It was from the port of Key West that the ironclad cruiser Maine sailed. The ship exploded in Havana Bay in 1898, precipitating the intervention of the United States into the longstanding struggle of the Cuban people against Spanish colonialism.

These and many other historical factors promoted demographic, economic, political and cultural exchanges between Key West and Cuba, giving the Florida Keys a great Latin flavor which is still present today. Cuban-Americans of the fourth and fifth generations treasure the cultural legacy of their Cuban ancestors and savor their Spanish language.

Beginning in 1869, an increase in Cuban emigration to Key West reached spectacular levels due to the transfer of an important portion of the tobacco industry to the Key. This exodus was accompanied by the movement of capital, know-how and specialized labor with Cuban raw materials for the manufacture of habanos (cigars made with Cuban tobacco and rolling style). Several reasons account for the move but it was mainly the greater proximity to American markets, the principal consumer of habanos. Due to a massive Cuban presence, Key West again became Cayo Hueso, which means “bone island” in Spanish. Cayo Hueso is the original name the Spaniards gave the Key when they first found it, deserted and covered with human bones. According to legend, these bones belonged to Florida Indians who had been persecuted by invaders from the north. They had been driven south through the islets until they arrived at the southern end of the peninsula where they suffered a final defeat. The few survivors escaped in their canoes and settled in Cuba. Due to English pronunciation, Cayo Hueso became further anglicized as Key West.

The development of a tobacco industry transformed Key West for several decades into the most dynamic urban center in Florida. Its cosmopolitanism increased with its expanding population: Anglos from the Bahamas and the southern states as well as Spanish Cubans, including African slaves and freedmen. The tobacco workers (tabaqueros) were 3,000 in number in 1868 and by 1878 their ranks had increased to 12,000. They were mostly Cubans.

Thus was Cayo Hueso when Cuban patriot José Martí visited in 1891 and worked restlessly to organize the war he hoped would end with the independence of his subjugated homeland. About it he wrote, “A handful of Cuban workers gave rise to Key West” ["Un puñado de trabajadores cubanos levantó a Cayo Hueso"]. But tobacco prosperity in Key West was relatively ephemeral. By the end of the 1880s a number of factors led to the transfer of an important part of the industry to the flourishing city of Tampa. This resulted in the full decline of Key West by the beginning of the twentieth century, a decline from which it only recovered several decades later and then only thanks to a tourist boom. Today, Key West and its 33,000 permanent residents receive approximately two million tourists a year.

The millionaire Henry Flagler saw this booming future looming when he realized his dream in 1912: a railroad that would unite the Keys with the peninsular State of Florida and the rest of the United States. In fact, that dream became a vast engineering project on the Keys and beyond: the railroad, by way of ferries, would continue all the way south to Havana and be integrated to control the Panama Canal and interoceanic navigation. The Keys were showing their strategic and economic importance.

A devastating tropical hurricane destroyed the railroad in 1935, but the way to progress was already established and, in its place, another surprising construction took place: the Overseas Highway, which linked the Keys to Miami with U.S. 1. For many years, this highway was the main link from Key West to Miami and to the rest of the United States.

Key West was also called “Key to the Gulf,” just like Cuba was once considered by Spain as the “Key to the New World, Safeguard of the Western Indies.” These names underline the strategic importance and shared historical destinies of the islands as well as affinities in their economic, cultural and political matters.

Together with Havana, Key West offers, and has benefited by, a warm, cozy, joyful, nocturnal, cosmopolitan and dynamic atmosphere that has attracted famous personalities such as Ernest Hemingway and Tennessee Williams.

Both cities are splendid mosaics of colors and rhythms, as shown by their respective architecture, squares, streets, harbors and musical traditions. Havana possesses a venerable elegance preserved in its aged, centuries-old palaces and fortresses. Key West captures the light enchantment of southern United States, febrile in spite of its dreamlike condition. Both Havana and Key West are marine “enclaves” and, as such, they are hospitable places favored for their varied enjoyment and for the enrichment of the soul.