Insurgent Cuba - by Ada Ferrer (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

In the late nineteenth century, in an age of ascendant racism and imperial expansion, there emerged in Cuba a movement that unified black, mulatto, and white men in an attack on Europe's oldest empire, with the goal of creating a nation explicitly defined as antiracist. This book tells the story of the thirty-year unfolding and undoing of that movement.

Ada Ferrer examines the participation of black and mulatto Cubans in nationalist insurgency from 1868, when a slaveholder began the revolution by freeing his slaves, until the intervention of racially segregated American forces in 1898. In so doing, she uncovers the struggles over the boundaries of citizenship and nationality that their participation brought to the fore, and she shows that even as black participation helped sustain the movement ideologically and militarily, it simultaneously prompted accusations of race war and fed the forces of counterinsurgency.

Carefully examining the tensions between racism and antiracism contained within Cuban nationalism, Ferrer paints a dynamic portrait of a movement built upon the coexistence of an ideology of racial fraternity and the persistence of presumptions of hierarchy.

Review Quotes

"A significant contribution to the historiography on race and race relations in Cuba, its revolutionary movements, and on the construction of Cuban nationhood. . . . It should be read in courses on race relations and independence movements in Latin America and the Caribbean."--American Historical Review

"An admirable book; Ada Ferrer has attentively examined the dynamics between the racial groups involved in Cuba's struggle towards independence. . . . [She] meticulously documents these struggles and provocatively reinterprets them. Most impressive is her ability to keep her analytical eye close to the Cuban ground."--Times Literary Supplement

"An important analysis of race in early Cuban nationalism."--CHOICE

"Ferrer cuts against the grain of a romantic, nationalist Cuban historiography that tends to see only what was inclusive and progressive in the wars for liberation. Anyone who wants to understand modern Cuba should read Ferrer's account of the Cuban insurgency."--Journal of Military History

"The best overview in English of the role of race in the Cuban independence movement. . . . This book makes clear both the great accomplishments in day-to-day race relations that were achieved and the deep structures of race that still stood when the Yankees intervened."--Journal of American History

"This study combines in-depth archival research in Cuba with a judicious use of more recent writing on race, nationalism, and postcolonial theory. Ferrer is particularly successful at showing how notions of freedom, citizenship, race, labor, and cubanidad were all contested social constructs that were forged in the context of Cuba's two wars for independence."--Latin American Research Review

About the Author