Black Missions in Cuba: Tracing Diaspora and Nation through Biography and Religious History

On May 27, 1898, a month after the U.S. began the blockade of Cuba that initiated the Spanish-American War, the Bishops of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church of the U.S. held their annual meeting in Philadelphia. They “felt inspired of God to send a missionary of the Cross to the people of outraged and priest ridden Cuba, [along] with Shafter’s Army.” For this position they chose Henry Charles Clifford Astwood, an Afro-Caribbean migrant from the Turks islands. Astwood—a naturalized U.S. citizen and ex-U.S. Consul to Santo Domingo—organized the Cuban AME Church with eleven members on August 17, 1898 with support from the AME Missionary Department. Yet despite initial success, by November there was “no means with which to support the work” and the AME Church’s diasporic project in Cuba failed.[1]

This paper explores how Astwood’s trajectory from the Turks islands to the Dominican Republic, U.S., and Cuba informed his thinking about race relations. Astwood advocated for racial integration and equality in schooling but also argued that the AME Church rid itself of its “African” identity. His ideas about racial equality were based on his idealized understanding of race in the Caribbean. At the same time, as a naturalized U.S. citizen, U.S. government representative, and AME missionary, Astwood was a symbol of U.S.-centric ideology that contrasted with the diasporic project he professed. The institutional hierarchy and chronic poverty of the AME Church similarly prevented the church from sustaining its diasporic mission in Cuba. Instead, the Church under Astwood and other African Americans reproduced a hierarchy in which Americans ranked above Cubans. This paper explores the tension between national and diasporic projects through biography and institutional history, and thus discusses racial and national tensions across scales of analysis.

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[1] H.B. Parks, “An Appeal for Suffering Cuba,” The Christian Recorder, November 3, 1898.

See more of: Caribbean Circulations: Race, Nation, and Citizenship in Cuba, 1890–1980
See more of: AHA Sessions

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