Insurgent Cuba

by Ferrer, Ada

• ISBN13: 9780807847831
• ISBN10: 0807847836
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-10-01
• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Ada Ferrer teaches Latin American and Caribbean history at New York University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction. A Revolution the World Forgot	1	(14)
Part I. War
Slaves, Insurgents, and Citizens: The Early Ten Years' War, 1868--1870	15	(28)
Region, Race, and Transformation in the Ten Years' War, 1870--1878	43	(27)
Fear and Its Uses: The Little War, 1879--1880	70	(23)
Part II. Peace
A Fragile Peace: Colonialism, the State, and Rural Society, 1878--1895	93	(19)
Writing the Nation: Race, War, and Redemption in the Prose of Independence, 1886--1895	112	(29)
Part III. War Again
Insurgent Identities: Race and the Western Invasion, 1895--1896	141	(29)
Race, Culture, and Contention: Political Leadership and the Onset of Peace	170	(25)
Epilogue and Prologue. Race, Nation, and Empire	195	(8)
Notes	203	(46)
Bibliography	249	(18)
Index	267