Celso Caesar Moreno (1830 – March 12, 1901) was an adventurer and a controversial political figure on the world stage, and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Hawaii under Kalākaua. Born in Italy, he fought in the Crimean War and lived throughout Asia, Hawaii and the United States, often taking sides with the indigenous underdog against British imperialism (though a promoter of Italian imperialist dreams). He moved from one career to another, one grand scheme to another, often trying to convince governments to pay huge sums of money for his proposals. His efforts at establishing a trans-Pacific telegraph cable got official government authorization, but no financial backers. He became a naturalized American citizen in 1878, and a naturalized citizen of Hawaii in 1880. Moreno spent his final years living in Washington, D. C., trying to eliminate the padrone system that created slavery conditions within the Italian immigrant labor force.
Early life
Celso Caesar Moreno, also known as Cesare Moreno and C. C. Moreno, was born into a Roman Catholic family in the Piedmont region of Italy at Dogliani. According to testimony he gave in an 1896 court trial, he was born in 1830, and became a naturalized United States citizen in California in 1878. His family was financially well off enough to send him to private Catholic schools where he became fluent in multiple languages. After furthering his education at a military academy, Moreno enlisted in the Piedmontese regular army, serving in the Crimean War. Before the war's end, he decided against a military career, and enrolled in the University of Genoa, graduating as a civil engineer in 1856.
Asia
Moreno spent the years 1855-64 in Asia, where documentation is sparse to confirm his own self-promoting accounts, which show him always on the side opposing British (and Dutch) imperialism. After coming to sympathise with Turkish Muslims by fighting with Piedmont's army in the Crimean War, Moreno made his way to British India where according to his own account he became intimate with the rebels in the Indian Mutiny, notably Nana Sahib, whose anti-British words he quotes approvingly; "The palm of barbarity and cruelty consummated in India...does not belong to us black and barbarous Indians, but rather to the white and civilized English …The East India Company was the most immoral and rapacious institution that history can commemorate". Moreno claimed to have then journeyed to Rangoon, newly conquered by the British, where he sympathetically interviewed the captive last Mughal sultan, Bahadur Shah.
Moreno then travelled to Bangkok and down the Peninsula, whence he took a Malay vessel to the independent sultanate of Aceh, North Sumatra,in 1858-9. A good linguist, including in Arabic and Malay, he there called himself Mustafa Vizir, exploited his past links with Ottoman Turkey and anti-British Muslim India and even associated himself with the legendary Muslim kingdom of Rum (sharing the aura of Alexander the Great, ancient Rome, Byzantium and the Ottomans) by calling himself a citizen of Rome. This certainly would have impressed the ruling Sultan Alauddin Ibrahim Mansur Syah 1859–1862, who had revived the 16th century Aceh link with Turkey and asked for its protection, as well as exploring an anti-Dutch alliance with France. Moreno made much in the US and especially Italy of having married a beautiful princess, Ibrahim's daughter, but was quiet about the corollary of that evident fact, that he must have presented himself as a Muslim.