362 Chapter 15
surprising. His primary interest had always been Cuban nationalism
and independence. In addition, an important goal of Afro-Cubans had
been met with the guarantee of suffrage for black men.
Juan Gualberto Gómez was certainly integrated into the power
structure after independence. He sat on the Constituent Assembly,
was appointed to the Havana Board of Education, was elected as a
representative for the national legislature, and generally had good con-
nections to the American occupation government. Yet he was also
highly critical of the American occupation. He fought against the Platt
amendment, ultimately supporting Bartolomé Masó for president
rather than Tomás Estrada Palma based on their stance on the Platt
Amendment (Costa 1984: 237). And despite Helg’s denouncement of
Gómez for not supporting separate black organizations such as the
Partido Independiente de Color, and for inadvertently placing obsta-
cles in the way of those who would seek to improve their socioeco-
nomic status by limiting their access to jobs, Gómez sent his son and
several other Afro-Cuban children to an allblack school in the United
States which focused on education and industry.
More research has to be done to determine Gómez’s precise moti-
vations in sending these Afro-Cuban students to Tuskegee. The first
group arrived just as Gómez returned to Cuba from New York in the
summer of 1898, suggesting that the plans for this exchange might
have been laid while he was in New York, or more likely, during his
trip to Florida to fundraise among tobacco workers there for the inde-
pendence war effort on behalf of Estrada Palma.^10 Booker T. Wash-
ington had sent a scout to Florida to recruit Cuban students for the
school with little success, but perhaps those Florida Cubans transmit-
ted the information to Gómez.
Sending students to this particular school signals that Juan Gual-
berto Gómez was still concerned for the specific conditions of black
- Frank Guridy cites the four students as arriving in November of 1901 with a letter
of introduction from Gómez. Four students, including Gómez’s son, in fact arrived in - By the time the 1901- 1902 school year began at Tuskegee, there were 21 students
from Cuba.