The Forgotten Jewish Network Behind Cuba’s Fight Against Spain

For many Americans, Spain in 1898 represented a fading colonial power struggling to hold Cuba. For some Jewish immigrants, it also recalled the empire that expelled Jews in 1492 and became synonymous with centuries of religious persecution.

Joseph Pulitzer, the Hungarian-born Jewish immigrant who came to America in 1864 and built the New York World into a publishing powerhouse, helped intensify public attention on Cuba through what critics called yellow journalism—a sensationalist style defined by bold headlines, dramatic illustrations, and emotionally charged stories calibrated more to sell papers than to report events accurately. His paper competed bitterly with William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, turning the island’s crisis into a daily contest for readers and political urgency.

Though Pulitzer did not create America’s war with Spain by himself. President William McKinley faced strategic, commercial, humanitarian, and political pressures as Spain struggled to suppress the Cuban independence movement. Central to the coverage was General Valeriano Weyler’s reconcentration policy—a counterinsurgency strategy in which Spanish authorities forcibly re-located Cuba’s rural population into fortified camps to cut off the independence movement’s food supply and civilian support. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans were herded into these camps under rough conditions, and disease and starvation killed close to 400,000 Cubans, per some estimates. Abuse of power existed, but newspapers exaggerated and dramatized these incidents until American readers demanded intervention, creating an atmosphere in which war came to seem increasingly unavoidable.

Behind the loud headlines stood a quieter and more personal story. Years before the United States formally entered the war, Jewish immigrants in Key West had already organized in support of Cuban independence. Many had recently fled from political tensions in Imperial Russia. These Jewish migrants found common cause with the Cuban resistance, viewing them as kindred spirits seeking liberation from imperial rule.

Cuban independence fighter José Martí exploited this dynamic deliberately. Reaching out to the Jewish community in Key West, he reportedly wrote: “We are Jews in point of fortune, and we hope always for a Messiah who never comes.” The result was Club Abrabanel, a formal cell of the Cuban Revolutionary Party established in Key West in December 1892 and composed of 50 Jewish members drawn from the cigar-factory exile community.

The club took its name from Don Isaac Abrabanel, the 15th-century Jewish statesman, philosopher, and court financier who gained notoriety for his defiance of Spain during the Inquisition and the 1492 expulsion. For the members of Club Abrabanel, that name invoked a long memory of Spanish persecution and a determination to oppose Spanish power in the Caribbean five centuries later.

Louis Fine, a Vilnius-born grocer and El Barrio Gato resident who served as the local leader of Jewish religious life in Key West, emerged as a driving force in the club. Fine helped establish the local congregation and organized support for Cuban insurgents. In the biography he approved for the 1918 volume Prominent Jews of America, Fine described his role in “sending men and ammunition out of the United States” and framed it explicitly as “a part of Jewish vengeance against Spain, the old persecutor of the race.”

Fine did not act alone. Romanian Jewish brothers Edward and Joseph Steinberg raised money and collected revolutionary taxes for the Cuban cause. Russian-born merchant Louis Wolfson became connected to weapons deliveries. As rebellion intensified in the mid 1890s, the activists moved beyond fundraising—storing weapons, coordinating expeditions, and helping send rifles, machetes, dynamite, and other supplies to Cuban fighters across the Florida Straits.

Their work carried genuine danger. U.S. neutrality laws restricted armed expeditions against Spain, but Key West sat close enough to Cuba to become a vital staging ground for smugglers and revolutionaries. The club’s members viewed their involvement not merely as overseas activism but as a fight with historical meaning.

Carlos Roloff Mialofsky played a key role in connecting the Key West Jewish community to Cuba’s struggle against Spain. Born Karol Rolow-Miałowski on November 4, 1842, in Warsaw—then under Russian imperial rule—Roloff had served in the Union Army’s 9th Ohio Infantry Regiment during the Civil War before joining Cuba’s liberation movement. He rose to major general in the Cuban Liberation Army and served as a critical organizer of arms expeditions from Key West and Tampa to Cuban fighters in the field, personally coordinating the flow of rifles, dynamite, and men across the Florida Straits. One 1895 expedition under his command carried 280 men, 350 rifles, 4,700 pounds of dynamite, a Gatling gun, and a cannon.

Roloff drew a direct line between Poland’s misfortune and Cuba’s fight. “I am the son of unfortunate Poland,” he declared. “Destiny has been adverse to us Poles, but because I cannot offer my life for the country of my birth, I put all of my efforts for the freedom of that other land where I have lived among heroic men.”

In Cuban exile circles, “polaco” often signaled Jewish identity as well, since many Jews from the region were commonly called Poles. Roloff’s words therefore struck two chords simultaneously. He appealed to a community that understood exile and hoped to translate that shared experience into solidarity with Cuba.

The war itself also drew Jewish Americans into uniform. About 5,000 Jews served in the American military during the conflict out of an American force of roughly 280,000. 29 died in battle, including Jacob Wilbusky, a 16-year-old who became the first of Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders killed in Cuba.

Adolph Marix represented another thread of the story. The German-born Jewish naval officer became the first Jewish graduate of the United States Naval Academy. He had served as executive officer aboard the USS Maine before transferring shortly before its 1898 explosion in Havana Harbor. Marix later served as recorder for the naval inquiry into the sinking, an event that helped drive the nation into war and continues to be shrouded in controversy to this day.

During the conflict, Marix commanded the USS Scorpion and earned advancement for “eminent and conspicuous conduct in battle” during engagements at Manzanillo. He later reached the rank of vice admiral.

The Spanish-American War remained fundamentally a product of Gentile statecraft, waged by a traditional American WASP elite seeking naval supremacy and hemisphere-wide hegemony. Organized Jewry did not direct the American intervention, nor did the McKinley administration wage war on behalf of foreign grievances. Nevertheless, the shattering of the Spanish Empire carried immense symbolic weight for a global Jewish community that preserves a remarkably long historical memory. In dismantling the remaining Caribbean domains of an ancient adversary, this young, ascendant United States won considerable esteem among international Jewry, having inadvertently executed historic retribution against the very monarchy that had driven their ancestors into exile four centuries before.

The intervention in Cuba proved to be a pivotal case study for the international Jewish community, revealing the potential for the American government to function as an engine for their own agendas. They took careful note of this dynamic, eventually integrating it into the core of their operations in the decades following World War II.

José Niño is a freelance writer based in Charlotte, North Carolina. You can contact him via Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to his “Substack” newsletter by visiting “José Niño Unfiltered” on Substack.com.