Grenier, of The Legacy of Exile: Cubans in the United States.Pérez applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Sugar, Cigars, and Revolution: The Making of Cuban New York, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about Sugar, Cigars, and Revolution at the NYU Press website.
The public attention did not end with the ceremony. Immediately the finger pointing started on how a wedding had been turned into such a public spectacle, something that violated social convention of the time. The New York press was chastised by a Philadelphia newspaper for sensationalizing the event, something, argued the newspaper, which would not have happened in genteel Philadelphia.Page 99 is the last page of my description (which starts on page 95) of the extravagant wedding of Frances Amelia Bartlett and Don Esteban Santa Cruz de Oviedo in Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. The year was 1859 and New York had not yet entered the Gilded Age. The wedding’s crass public demonstration of unlimited wealth both shocked and enthralled New Yorkers. Every detail was widely reported in the press: the $5,000 bridal gown, the four $3,000 alternate gowns, a trousseau of some seventy-five dresses, and the jewelry ensemble worn by the bride, manufactured under special order by Tiffany and Company. Two-thousand invitations were sent, far more than the capacity of the church, and traffic had to be rerouted to accommodate the flow of carriages. Oviedo, the press reported, was a very rich Cuban sugar planter, the owner of “some of the most valuable estates in Cuba,” and slaves “without number.”
The public’s interest in the wedding was stoked not just by its ostentatiousness, but by the descriptions of the conjugants. The bride was eighteen, tall, elegant, fair, and blonde, the daughter of a distinguished ex-officer of the U.S. Navy. The groom was fifty-five, shorter than the bride and “darkishly disposed in the matter of complexion,” according to the Daily Tribune. The Cuban could not only afford a lavish wedding, but he was also buying a young and fair American bride.
My detailed description of the Bartlett-Oviedo wedding is important to the book’s narrative, for it illustrates two themes of Sugar, Cigars, and Revolution. One is my insistence in telling the social, cultural, and economic story of Cuban New York, beyond its political activism, the topic that has dominated the literature on Cuban émigrés. Indeed, one contribution of the book is to understand the better-known revolutionary activities within the broader context of the community’s life. The other theme is that the early Cuban presence in New York was shaped by the island’s elites, especially the planter class, which sold its sugar to the city’s many refineries. Wealthy Cubans spearheaded the early flow of sojourners and migrants to the city. This created a certain perception of Cubans among New Yorkers of the era. It is on that point that I end in page 99 the passage on the wedding:
One consequence of the wedding was to reaffirm the image of Cubans as the prototype of the wealthy foreigner of the day. [Simón] Camacho, the Venezuelan writer who lived in New York, devoted an entire chronicle to the wedding. He concluded it by reporting a conversation near Gramercy Park with a lady who, upon learning that Camacho was Latin American and clarifying that her sister was single, asked him: “Do you know a Cuban like Mr. Oviedo?”
--Marshal Zeringue
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