Jules R. Benjamin

Cuba between empires, 1878-1902

Exploring the history of Cuba from 1878 to 1902, the author explains the political dimensions both of Spains loss of sovereignty and of the US hegemony which replaced it. He also looks at the emotional strengths, political ambivalences and organizational weaknesses of the independence movement.

Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898

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 Europes 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. |Examines the tensions between racism and anti-racism in Cubas struggle to become a nation between 1868 and 1898.

Saving Cuba from the Cubans

Book reviewed in this article: n n n nLouis A. PA©rez Jr., The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography