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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.
List 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
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.
