Colonial Reckoning: Race and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

by Louis A Pérez Jr.

Overview

In Colonial Reckoning Louis A. Pérez Jr. examines Cuba’s wars for independence in the second half of the nineteenth century, focusing specifically on those Cubans who remained loyal to Spain. Drawing on newspaper articles, personal letters, military battle reports, government commissions, consular reports, literature, and other materials, Pérez shows how everyday black, white, and creole Cubans defended the Spanish empire as paramilitary guerrillas alongside white elites. These loyalist Cubans helped the Spanish fight a separatist insurgency composed of a similarly diverse population of Cubans. Pérez demonstrates that these wars were so deadly and drawn out precisely because Cubans fought on both sides, each holding myriad competing visions of sovereignty and contested meanings of nation. Complicating mythical and historiographical narratives that Cuban national liberation was a struggle waged between Cubans of color and white elites beholden to Spain, Pérez shows that the fight consisted of a great number of factions with unique and evolving motivations. In so doing, he interrogates anew the multifaceted social dimensions and multiple political aspects of the complex drama of Cuban national formation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478027584
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	11/17/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	312
File size:	22 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Louis A. Pérez Jr. is J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of numerous books, most recently, Rice in the Time of Sugar: The Political Economy of Food in Cuba.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction: Rethinking the Paradigms of National Formation  1
1. Something to Fear  11
2. Half Defeated upon Arrival  40
3. To Confront Impossible Odds  97
4. Neither Victor nor Vanquished: Reckoning Deferred  169
Notes  195
Index  265

Editorial Reviews

Louis A. Pérez Jr. accomplishes what few authors do when covering such well-known topics as Cuban independence: he takes a story we know well and not only provides a new interpretation depth of analysis but reframes it to show that independence was as much a civil war to the death between Cubans as it was a call for Cuba Libre.

The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery - Matt D. Childs

A work of deep reflection and wide research, Colonial Reckoning proposes a new framework for understanding the nineteenth-century Cuban wars for independence. Louis A. Pérez Jr. demonstrates that these were in many ways civil wars, during which Spain recruited tens of thousands of Cubans to fight against the insurrection and for the maintenance of Spanish sovereignty. Pérez argues that there emerged after independence a fractured nationality in which a seemingly disloyal portion of the population was figuratively written out of membership in the nation. That habit of mind, he suggests, at times emerges in different forms in Cuba today.

Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery - Rebecca J. Scott

"An accomplished historian, Pérez shows that Cuba’s heroic mythology of national liberation often omits the messy fact that many Cubans—white and Black—aligned with the colonialists, first from Spain and later from the United States."

Foreign Affairs - Richard Feinberg

"Pérez successfully complicates long-held and relatively unquestioned historiographical assumptions while foregrounding a series of frequently overlooked factors: the precarious balance of political, economic and social forces undergirding Spain’s authority over Cuba . . . . Pérez’ book, in short, manages to enrich a somewhat petrified historical narrative, adding subtlety and ambiguity to an inherited, mythical tale of heroes and villains drawn mostly in black and white."

ReVista - Alejandro Quintero Mächler

"A work of deep reflection and wide research, Colonial Reckoning proposes a new framework for understanding the nineteenth-century Cuban wars for independence. Louis A. Pérez Jr. demonstrates that these were in many ways civil wars, during which Spain recruited tens of thousands of Cubans to fight against the insurrection and for the maintenance of Spanish sovereignty. Pérez argues that there emerged after independence a fractured nationality in which a seemingly disloyal portion of the population was figuratively written out of membership in the nation. That habit of mind, he suggests, at times emerges in different forms in Cuba today."--Rebecca J. Scott, author of "Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery"

"Louis A. Pérez Jr. accomplishes what few authors do when covering such well-known topics as Cuban independence: he takes a story we know well and not only provides a new interpretation depth of analysis but reframes it to show that independence was as much a civil war to the death between Cubans as it was a call for Cuba Libre."--Matt D. Childs, author of "The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery"

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