Emerging out of the early stages of what might be termed post-normalization studies on US-Cuban relations is a book examining a rarely-acknowledged geography: Cuba's Isle of Youth (Isla de la Juventud), or what prior to the 1970s was known as the Isle of Pines. In his book, Michael Neagle aims to put the Isle on the historiographic map and to “rescue this overlooked story of American imperialism from obscurity” (7). The book is a timely, if at times overwrought, analysis of the Isle's significance in the context of US empire and Cuban sovereignty.
The work is a valuable contribution to transnational foreign relations history that zooms in on non-state actors—US speculators, farmers, business owners—rather than Washington bureaucrats. In their day, these men and women acted within the legacy of Manifest Destiny: what Neagle calls “Isle colonization” was a form of settler colonialism, so that the Isle stood as a new frontier for northerners that fit within an expansionist creed energizing modern US empire across the Americas.
The monograph forks into two periods. The first, the “Hay-Quesada era” (1898–1925), was the highpoint of US emigration, when prospectors flooded the Isle; their numbers peaked at roughly 2,000 in the second decade of the twentieth century. Neagle brings to the surface their interests and the US-Cuban politics they represented and combatted. Though mostly overlooked, the infamous Platt Amendment also stipulated that the Isle of Pines would be excluded from Cuban territory until a later date, which turned out to be 1925, when the Hay-Quesada Treaty was ratified and the Isle officially placed within Cuban jurisdiction.
In the years before the treaty, Neagle reveals, arriving US Americans purchased 90 percent of the Isle's arable land (8), developing commerce around fruits and vegetables, and levied considerable cultural influence in its schools, churches, and tourist services. On one hand, these groups upheld a settler colonial/imperial discourse that ratified American modernity and Cuban backwardness. Yet, on the other hand, arrivals from the United States found an untapped, Edenic land, where tropical weather made for decent land and a convalescent environment that eased certain illnesses. In vast detail, the reader learns of what spurred otherwise anonymous people to leave North Dakota, Iowa, and Wisconsin to search for wealth and rejuvenation. Their origin was to be the biggest market for their products, and they plainly saw themselves going to a land that eventually would be within the domain of the United States. Furthermore, the story of americanos and pineros also includes a dynamic, polyglot, multiracial cultural space smaller than the state of Rhode Island, where white Midwesterners and northeasterners crossed paths with African Americans and West Indian workers from the Cayman Islands and Jamaica, as well as emigrants hailing from Germany, China, and Japan.
The second period of the book encompasses the years from 1925 to 1960. In the 1950s, US Americans return in large numbers, as they did throughout Cuba. The revolution ends this resurgence, though Neagle argues that the revolution's anti-Americanism did not take hold on the Isle as it did on the mainland. Most of the account of this period, however, appears detached from the thematic threads of the book, and indeed some of the prose lags throughout these sections. Although Cubans and their interests do make an appearance in the book, more might have been said of their voices and sentiments, which would have added to the transnational discussion Neagle is trying to create. Finally, after mentioning the multiracial, multinational labor context, one would have liked more scrutiny of labor and race, as well as representative voices from the workers' ranks.
However, the scope of Neagle's research is quite impressive. Sources from the United States and Cuba, including the Isle itself, yield a litany of small and large newspapers, interviews, and information culled from Orville Platt's papers. Platt is a figure often mentioned in US-Cuban histories, but only in passing. Also admirable are numerous letters and testimonies from US Americans who lived there. In the end, Michael Neagle produces a well-written, innovative work that positively contributes to the history of US-Cuban relations.
