La Unión Martí-Maceo: A Minority Within a Minority
Near Tampa Bay, Florida
The Cuban centros of Ybor City built hospitals, libraries, and theaters for their members. The Afro-Cuban workers who rolled the same cigars in the same factories were not welcome inside them.
In the late eighteen nineties, El Club Nacional Cubano had included Black Cuban members. Then, around nineteen hundred, under pressure from Anglo-American political power in Tampa that was uncomfortable with racial integration in any form, the club moved to exclude its Black members. The decision fractured the Cuban community and forced Afro-Cuban residents to build their own separate institution.
On October twenty-sixth of nineteen hundred, twenty-four Afro-Cubans announced the formation of Los Libres Pensadores de Martí y Maceo, the Free Thinkers of Martí and Maceo. The name honored two figures central to Cuban independence: José Martí, the poet and revolutionary, and Antonio Maceo, the general known as the Bronze Titan, himself a man of African descent who fought and died for Cuban liberation.
The first meeting was held in the home of Ruperto and Paulina Pedroso, the same Afro-Cuban family that had hosted Martí himself during his organizing visits. In nineteen oh four, Los Libres Pensadores merged with another organization to form La Unión Martí-Maceo. They built a two-story clubhouse on Sixth Avenue at Eleventh Street in nineteen oh eight. It housed a social hall, an auditorium, and club rooms. The organization provided sick pay, subsidized medical care, and the same range of social and educational programming that the white centros provided their members.
In nineteen sixty-five, the city of Tampa demolished the Martí-Maceo clubhouse as part of an urban renewal initiative. The organization relocated to Seventh Avenue, where it continues to operate.
La Unión Martí-Maceo is one of the oldest continuously operating African American cultural organizations in the South. Most visitors walking Seventh Avenue in Ybor City pass it without knowing what it is or what it cost to build.
