Insurgent Cuba : race, nation, and revolution, 1868-1898 / Ada Ferrer.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 249-266) and index.

Introduction: A Revolution the World Forgot -- War -- Slaves, Insurgents, and Citizens: The Early Ten Years' War, 1868-1870 -- Region, Race, and Transformation in the Ten Years' War, 1870-1878 -- Fear and Its Uses: The Little War, 1879-1880 -- Peace -- A Fragile Peace: Colonialism, the State, and Rural Society, 1878-1895 -- Writing the Nation: Race, War, and Redemption in the Prose of Independence, 1886-1895 -- War Again -- Insurgent Identities: Race and the Western Invasion, 1895-1896 -- Race, Culture, and Contention: Political Leadership and the Onset of Peace -- Epilogue and Prologue: Race, Nation, and Empire.

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.

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