Key West, Negro Cabins and Palms

Key West, Florida, just ninety-two miles from Havana, was a center of Cuban revolutionary agitation leading up to the Spanish-American War of 1898—the same year Winslow Homer made this image of black workers on the small island. In the late nineteenth century, Key West’s strategic location at the north of the Caribbean basin stimulated investment and construction. By the 1890s it had a population of more than 18,000, of whom at least a third were Cuban-born. Four thousand of these individuals were of African descent.