List of Cubans in the 1871, 1875, and 1879 censuses of Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic
The 1,664 records of Cubans in the Puerto Plata censuses of 1871, 1875 and 1879, during and after the Ten Years' War, with each person's age, occupation, street and house.
Why Puerto Plata
Between 1868 and 1878, the Ten Years' War, Cuba's fight against Spanish colonial rule, drove many Cuban families into exile. Some settled in Puerto Plata, the commercial port on the Dominican Republic's north coast. The country had just ended its annexation to Spain in the Restoration War (1863-1865), and most of its public opinion sympathised with the Cuban cause.
According to the historian Agustín Sánchez Andrés, the Cuban and Puerto Rican exiles in Puerto Plata formed a legal society in January 1874. That November Gregorio Luperón, leader of the Partido Azul and an advocate of an Antillean confederation, set up the Junta Antillana there. When the Puerto Rican leader Eugenio María de Hostos arrived in May 1875, several newspapers appeared in support of Cuban independence.
The welcome had limits. In 1875, under Spanish pressure, President Ignacio María González ordered the main Cuban and Puerto Rican activists expelled from the city, and Luperón protested publicly. The plan to hand them over to Spanish steamers was dropped, but the tightening still forced several hundred Cubans and Puerto Ricans to leave for Jamaica, Haiti and Venezuela.
What this collection holds
Each record is one row from one of the city's three censuses whose nationality reads "Cuban": 197 in 1871, 1,167 in 1875 and 300 in 1879. Depending on the row, a record gives age, marital status (single, married, widowed or minor), the occupation as it was written ("Comercio," "Su casa," "Escolar," "Magisterio"), the street and house number and, where one was noted, the owner of the house and of the land. The 1871 census names the house owner on all 197 records; the 1875 and 1879 censuses do so on 196 of 1,167 and 65 of 300.
The nationality is the one the census assigned. It does not say where the person was born. And because only the rows classified as Cuban were extracted, relatives entered as Dominican, even in families of Cuban origin, are not here: a household in this collection may be incomplete. A shared address does not prove kinship either; the cases in "In this collection" rest on the census itself or on a published biography, and say which.
How to read the counts
The figures are records, not people. A person who appears in two censuses has two records, and this collection does not join them without checking identity. Nor are they an independent count of the original manuscripts: they are the records Cuba Research Project extracted from the published transcriptions.
Between 1875 and 1879 the records fall from 1,167 to 300, which is 867 fewer, or 74%. That drop does not measure how many people left, or where they went, or why. A census does not ask about destinations, and how complete each enumeration was and the ordinary turnover of a port's population count too. The war ended in 1878 and some families went back to Cuba. According to the Office of the Historian of the City of Camagüey, Manuel Ramón Silva, taken to Puerto Plata with his family as a child, returned to Cuba after the Pact of Zanjón. But others had already left for Jamaica, Haiti or Venezuela, and some arrived after 1878: Fernando Figueredo Socarrás is in the 1879 census. The censuses show who was in Puerto Plata that year, not where they went next.
Sources
The censuses. The records come from much larger transcriptions of the 1871, 1875 and 1879 censuses of Puerto Plata, made by Luis Héctor Arthur Sosa and Víctor José Arthur Nouel and published on Genealogía Dominicana (now Familias Dominicanas): the census index, 1871, 1875 and 1879. They are modern typed text, not the manuscript. From them Cuba Research Project extracted only the rows whose nationality is "Cuban."
History and biography. The cases in "In this collection" rely on these readings, which are not part of the censuses:
- Agustín Sánchez Andrés, “En busca de la reconciliación: la diplomacia española hacia la República Dominicana tras el fracaso de la reanexión, 1865-1879”, Tzintzun 55 (2012): the exile in Puerto Plata, the Junta Antillana and the Spanish pressure of 1875.
- Office of the Historian of the City of Camagüey, “Manuel Ramón Silva, sin bajar el brazo mambí”: the Silva family's exile and their son's return after Zanjón.
- Office of the Historian of the City of Camagüey, “Enrique Loynaz del Castillo, general y lírico”: his birth in Puerto Plata in 1871 to parents from Camagüey.
- Edwin Rafael Espinal Hernández, “Federico García Godoy, 90 años después”, Cápsulas Genealógicas, Instituto Dominicano de Genealogía (15 March 2014): the novelist's parents arrived in 1868 and settled first in Puerto Plata.
- Bárbara Oliva García, “Un camagüeyano confundido por bayamés”, Office of the Historian of the City of Camagüey (2023), and Frank de Varona, “Fernando Figueredo Socarrás”, El Lugareño (2018): his move to Puerto Plata at the end of the war.
- Julio González Hernández, “Mella genealógico”, Areíto, Hoy, 5 March 2016: Ildefonso Mella Brea, son of Ramón Matías Mella.
- Juan Ventura Almonte, “Presencia de ciudadanos ilustres en Puerto Plata en el siglo XIX”, Clío no. 180 (2010), note 46: the Imbert family and Segundo Imbert Delmonte.
To keep researching
The full transcription of each census also includes residents of other nationalities. Use it to see who else lived in a house, to find relatives entered as Dominican, and to check any reading. If a person on this list seems to appear in another census, compare age, occupation and house before treating them as the same person, and search their name in the other Cuba Research Project collections.
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