Insurgent Cuba

“An admirable book; Ada Ferrer has attentively examined the dynamics between the racial groups involved in Cuba’s struggle towards independence. . . . [She] meticulously documents these struggles and provocatively reinterprets them. Most impressive is her ability to keep her analytical eye close to the Cuban ground.”—Times Literary Supplement

“A significant contribution to the historiography on race and race relations in Cuba, its revolutionary movements, and on the construction of Cuban nationhood. . . . It should be read in courses on race relations and independence movements in Latin America and the Caribbean.”—American Historical Review

“This study combines in-depth archival research in Cuba with a judicious use of more recent writing on race, nationalism, and postcolonial theory. Ferrer is particularly successful at showing how notions of freedom, citizenship, race, labor, and cubanidad were all contested social constructs that were forged in the context of Cuba’s two wars for independence.”—Latin American Research Review

“The best overview in English of the role of race in the Cuban independence movement. . . . This book makes clear both the great accomplishments in day-to-day race relations that were achieved and the deep structures of race that still stood when the Yankees intervened.”—Journal of American History

“Ferrer cuts against the grain of a romantic, nationalist Cuban historiography that tends to see only what was inclusive and progressive in the wars for liberation. Anyone who wants to understand modern Cuba should read Ferrer’s account of the Cuban insurgency.”—Journal of Military History

“An important analysis of race in early Cuban nationalism.”—CHOICE

“An exhaustively researched, brilliant, and absorbing reinterpretation of Cuba’s nineteenth-century revolution, emphasizing its anticolonial and antiracist rhetoric and dimensions. Ferrer’s original and nuanced analysis captures the complex nature of the struggle and its inner tensions and contradictions. An outstanding contribution to Cuban historiography.”—Colin A. Palmer, Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York

“Ada Ferrer’s study of the Cuban revolution is one of the most original and stimulating treatments of race relations and racial ideologies in the Americas that I have seen in a decade. The book should have an appeal to both Latin American specialists and to students of race and racism in the Americas and elsewhere. This is a powerful story, powerfully told.”—Thomas C. Holt, University of Chicago