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.