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Reviews of Books
| Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century. By Alejandro de la Fuente. Envisioning Cuba. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. 304 pages. $40.00 (cloth).
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Reviewed by María Elena Díaz, University of California, Santa Cruz
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Alejandro de la Fuente's new book, Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century, is a most welcome addition to the emerging field of Atlantic studies and to Cuban historiography. Havana's location in the Atlantic world is generally linked to the slave-based sugar plantation system developed in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—that is, to "what Pieter Emmer has called the second Atlantic" (226). The present book moves the story back more than two centuries to Havana's insertion in the first Atlantic system then dominated by the Iberian empires. Although previous generations of historians have documented various aspects of the city's early development, their main emphasis has often been on Havana's imperial role as a military outpost and major stopover of the Spanish fleet system. De la Fuente's book revises—or, rather, complements—that limited imperial view by highlighting Havana's maritime, commercial role as a port city, by placing it in the context of Atlantic studies, and by providing a richly textured local view of the emerging city. |
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The book's title alludes to the classic work of early Atlantic studies: Pierre Chaunu and Huguette Chaunu's Séville et l'Atlantique, though Havana and the Atlantic is only obliquely related to its famous predecessor and covers a much shorter period, the 1560s–1610.1 While De la Fuente's starting point correlates to the organization of the Spanish fleet system, traditionally associated with Havana's takeoff, the rationale for ending in 1610 is not explicit. There is no mention of the dramatic decline of Seville's Atlantic trade by the 1620s or of events such as the Dutch penetration of Caribbean trade circuits that may have affected the port city's development or its reorientation in the seventeenth century's Atlantic world. The epilogue does not hint at any ruptures to come at the end of the "long" sixteenth century. |
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Like many current Atlantic studies, the book tries to reconstruct early transoceanic flows of commodities, people, and ideas that subvert presentist notions of national boundaries—or even imperial ones—still informing many historiographies. Except for some examples of transimperial crossings (mostly of commodities and material culture), De la Fuente pretty much stays within the boundaries of the Iberian Atlantic. The book's chapters deal with shipping and trade, the role of the fleets and the service economy, population and urban growth, production, slavery and the racial order, and the people of the land. Access to Cuban archives is notoriously unreliable for scholars working outside Cuba. Thanks to collaborators on the island, De la Fuente was able to access and process a considerable volume of data, including local notarial records, treasury registries, and town council records, enabling record linkages as well as fascinating glimpses of networks, careers, and lives. At times, however, he stays too close to these sources, leaving this reviewer wishing for more probing analysis of the data and their significance. A more explicit engagement with related work on Havana, even if more imperial in orientation or based on other archives, would have further enhanced this study.2 |
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