To Cuba and Back

Richard Henry Dana Jr., already famous for Two Years Before the Mast, made a short winter trip to Cuba in 1859 and turned it into this brisk travel narrative, published that same year. Over a few crowded weeks he takes in Havana’s streets and cathedrals, tours the sugar and coffee plantations, sits through an opera and a cockfight, and talks with planters, priests, and colonial officials. As a lawyer with a keen social conscience, Dana looks hard at the island’s slave economy and the machinery of Spanish rule, recording what he sees without softening it. The result is a sharp, readable snapshot of Cuba on the eve of enormous change. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.