On New Year’s Day, 1892, the Cuban nationalist revolutionary José Martí was in Key West, Florida, delivering rousing speeches in support of Cuban independence. Martí was the latest in a 40-year line of revolutionary leaders seeking to free the island of Cuba from Spanish rule, and his political base included tens of thousands of Cuban exiles who worked in the cigar factories of Key West, Tampa, and New York, many of which were owned by Jewish tobacco magnates. Martí’s speeches in the Florida factories were typically marked by a unifying and universal appeal to all races and classes—partly because, like others before him, Martí calculated that revolution in Cuba would require the support of its enslaved Black population. “No man has any special rights because he belongs to one race or another,” Martí wrote in Patria, the newspaper of the Cuban Revolutionary Party. As early as 1891, in perhaps the most famous essay of his career, he concluded: “There are no races.” This rhetoric largely appealed to the Jews of Key West, who had recently arrived from places in Eastern Europe where they had been deemed inferior. In fact, the elaborate scene at Eduardo Gato’s Key West cigar factory where Martí spoke had been set by a Romanian Jewish businessman named Edward Steinberg. As one veteran of the revolutionary struggle recalled a decade later, Steinberg had provided beer and candy for the workers and their children in attendance and transformed the workaday factory into a dazzling reception hall, decorated with patriotic streamers, flags, portraits of Cuban heroes, and elaborate painted backdrops portraying allegorical scenes of Cuban independence.