Insurgent Cuba

Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898

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by Ada Ferrer

University of North Carolina Press

Due/Published November 1999, 352 pages, paper

ISBN 0807847836

In the late nineteenth-century Cuba, a movement that unified black, mulatto, and white men rose against Europe's oldest empire, with the goal of creating a nation explicitly defined as antiracist. Ferrer tells the story of the thirty-year unfolding and undoing of that movement. She 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.Ferrer examines the tensions between racism and antiracism contained within Cuban nationalism and paints a dynamic portrait of a movement built upon the coexistence of an ideology of racial fraternity and the persistence of presumptions of hierarchy.

"Ada Ferrer's study of the Cuban revolution is one of the most original and stimulating treatments of race relations and racial ideologies in the Americas that I have seen in a decade. The book should have an appeal to both Latin American specialists and to students of race and racism in the Americas and elsewhere. This is a powerful story, powerfully told."--Thomas C. Holt, University of Chicago

ContentsIntroduction. A Revolution the World Forgot

Part I. War
Chapter 1. Slaves, Insurgents, and Citizens: The Early Ten Years' War, 1868-1870
Chapter 2. Region, Race, and Transformation in the Ten Years' War, 1870-1878
Chapter 3. Fear and Its Uses: The Little War, 1879-1880

Part II. Peace
Chapter 4. A Fragile Peace: Colonialism, the State, and Rural Society, 1878-1895
Chapter 5. Writing the Nation: Race, War, and Redemption in the Prose of Independence, 1886-1895

Part III. War Again
Chapter 6. Insurgent Identities: Race and the Western Invasion, 1895-1896
Chapter 7. Race, Culture, and Contention: Political Leadership and the Onset of Peace

Epilogue and Prologue. Race, Nation, and Empire
Notes
Bibliography
Index