To make a free nation: Race and the struggle for independence in Cuba, 1868-1898.

Abstract

When the Spanish colonies of South and Central America acquired their independence between 1810 and 1825, Cuba remained the "ever-faithful isle." Faced with potential social upheaval and the numerical predominance of Cubans of color, creole elites opted to maintain the colonial bond. In 1868 when nationalist insurrection finally erupted in Cuba, slaves and free people of color emerged as active protagonists in that movement. Their growing participation, and in some cases their roles as leaders, produced significant shifts in elite and popular understandings of the connections between race and nationhood in late colonial Cuba. This dissertation examines these shifts in racial and national thinking, placing them in the context of broader transformations in Cuban nationalism during the period 1868-1898--a period which saw three anti-colonial wars against Spain and the legal end of slavery in 1886. On the one hand, increasing support and leadership from Cubans of color helped transform the discourse and practice of Cuban nationalism to include the idea of racial equality as a foundation of Cuban nationality. On the other, significant Afrocuban involvement in the independence process fed into existing discourses of race war and racial fear and led to the emergence, by the final war in 1895, of a kind of "silence of race," whereby leaders of the movement claimed either the irrelevance of race as a category or the resolution of "the race problem." This silence of race, imposed from above, was continually challenged by insurgents in the daily life of the insurrection. Participants of color embraced Cuban nationalism not because of a diminishing consciousness of race, but because the nationalist movement provided a language and an arena in which to legitimize their own struggles for equality and freedom. The project draws on military records authored by members of both the Spanish and Cuban armies, war diaries and memoirs, and testimony from civil and military court cases to address broader questions about popular nationalism, racial identity, and social movements.