Twentieth-century Cuba Research Articles

Radical Prescription: Citizenship and the Politics of Tuberculosis in Twentieth-century Cuba, by Kelly Urban

Radical Prescription: Citizenship and the Politics of Tuberculosis in Twentieth-century Cuba, by Kelly Urban

Black British Migrants in Cuba: Race, Labor, and Empire in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean, 1898–1948 by Jorge L. Giovannetti-Torres

Reviewed by: Black British Migrants in Cuba: Race, Labor, and Empire in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean, 1898–1948 by Jorge L. Giovannetti-Torres Aldo A. Lauria Santiago Jorge L. Giovannetti-Torres, Black British Migrants in Cuba: Race, Labor, and Empire in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean, 1898–1948. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2018. 318 pp. Black British Migrants in Cuba is an impressive, in-depth history of the migration and experience of British Caribbean people, most of them Black, in Cuba during the first half of the twentieth century. Sugar mills that were US, Canadian, and locally owned required vast numbers of laborers for cane cutting and other kinds of manual labor. Under American tutelage, Cuban authorities allowed what was often privately controlled migration of workers from the rest of the Caribbean. Migrants were persistently seen as threatening aliens in racist terms. The book is framed by a fascinating idea: how could black colonial subjects consider their liberation from colonialism and racism from within their diasporic condition? A second persistent theme is the long tradition of antiblack racism and fear and the particular forms these took in nineteenth and early twentieth century Cuba. The book is based on extensive archival research in dozens of archives in nine countries. It is difficult to imagine a more thorough work of archival research, especially as it includes sources drawn from the diverse local origins of English Caribbean migrants as well as the places in Cuba that ended being permanent or temporary home for thousands. The author also carried out many oral histories and identified older ethnographic materials in various archival sites. The one persistent claim through the book is the weight of the (sometimes indistinguishable) complex multiple forms of subordination (and agency) of immigrant workers: as black, colonial, and migrant guest workers with few rights in Cuba subjected to exploitation, violence, and mistreatment, and as colonial subjects of the English crown, which essentially served as their own form of racially framed colonial citizenship. The most interesting dimension of this, which has been considered and debated by other authors working on the West Indian diaspora, is how well the crown and crown officials served to [End Page 329] protect and support their subjects while in Cuba (or any other country or area like the Panama Canal Zone, New York City, or Honduras). At just over three hundred pages, the book is organized into ten chapters, an introduction, and an epilogue. The introduction provides an important framing device for the book: a 1944 call for a pan-Caribbean workers' movement free from British rule, issued and supported in Cuba. Chapter 1 introduces the history of English-speaking Antillean workers in Cuba as part of larger movements of black bodies to and in the Caribbean. It also introduces readers to one of the principal contexts discussed throughout the book: the origin of the persistent fears by Cuban elites of blackness, black agency, and black bodies. This chapter reviews the history of antiblack fears, policies, and black resistance since the early nineteenth century. The book carefully traces the importance of the migrants to Cuba's sugar industry and their presence produced both mistreatment and resistance. Chapter 2 reviews the processes of departure and arrival of the migrants works through the 1940s. It covers demographics, policies, origins, and settlement through ethnographic and archival sources. The data on the diversity of people's origins and paths, and the United Fruit Company enclaves in Cuba and its pan-Caribbean networks, are especially important. The third chapter presents extensive evidence of violence against black migrants and generalized fear. Especially valuable here is the detailed discussion of the Jobabo massacre of 1917. Chapter 4 discusses the transnational networks of support claimed by English Caribbean migrants while in Cuba. Here the author provides a very nuanced discussion of how responsive British authorities, including consuls, were to the demands and claims of their subjects while in Cuba. It also considers the role of Afro-diasporic solidarities including the UNIA. The book also reviews how the migrants experienced the depression, repatriation, and the postdepression years? Next, chapter 5 considers the impact of economic crisis on migrants' work conditions, mobility, and status. It introduces evidence of the...

“LookingForwardAlways toAfrica”:William George Emanuel and the Politics of Repatriation in Cuba, 1894–1906

AbstractThis article examines a back-to-Africa movement from early twentieth-century Cuba. The leader, William George Emanuel, arrived in Cuba from Antigua in 1894, and over the next several years, he worked to unite thecabildos de naciónandsociedades de coloron the island. After independence in 1898, Emanuel and his followers rejected Cuban citizenship and began petitioning Britain, the United States, Belgium, and the Gold Coast for land grants in West and Central Africa. Each petition, however, told a different story. Emanuel skillfully tailored his appeals according to his audience, variously claiming that he and his followers were “British,” “African,” “Congolese,” or “Mina,” among other identities. Anticipating the rise of Marcus Garvey by over a decade, Emanuel's campaign reveals an overlooked pan-Africanist strand in the typical narrative for this period of Cuban history. Drawing mainly on the petitions themselves, the article analyzes how Emanuel blended the languages of empire, nation, race, and ethnicity to create a dynamic pan-African identity. More generally, the article demonstrates how marginalized groups have long negotiated the boundaries of identity in the pursuit of belonging.

Sketches of Black People by White Catalan-Cuban Intellectuals: Transculturation in Fernando Ortiz’s and Jaume Valls’s Afrocubanismo in 1920s Havana

The study of the raise of Afrocubanismo enables understanding of how, during the 1920s, Cuban nationalism adapted in order to exploit the recombinant qualities common to the territories of the Caribbean. Drawing on Fernando Ortiz’s, Stuart Hall’s and Paul Gilroy’s theories on the formation and construction of identities, this article brings a focus on the positions of enunciation within the practices of representation of blackness by cultural theorist Fernando Ortiz and visual artist Jaume Valls, in order to illustrate their role and the role of other members of the Catalan-Cuban intellectual community in the movement of Afrocubanismo and the reshaping of the idea of Cuban national identity during the 1920s. The analysis includes a comparison of graphic artists Lluis Bagaria’s and Jaume Vall’s representations of blackness in the Catalan-Cuban journal La Nova Catalunya (Havana, 1908–1959) in order to illustrate the processes of transculturation expressed through the representation of black subjects in the journal as part of the wider processes of recreation of identities within the Catalan-Cuban intellectual community during the first three decades of the twentieth century. The article addresses the limitations of nationalistic points of view to grasp de complexities of diasporic realities and highlights the usefulness of the concept of transculturation to understand processes of formation of identities in twentieth-century Cuba.

Laboring for the State: Women, Family, and Work in Revolutionary Cuba, 1959–1971. By Rachel Hynson (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2020) 314 pp. $39.99

Laboring for the State: Women, Family, and Work in Revolutionary Cuba, 1959–1971. By Rachel Hynson (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2020) 314 pp. $39.99

Isla nerviosa: madness, psychiatry, and reform in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Cuba

Isla nerviosa: madness, psychiatry, and reform in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Cuba

The Paramilitarism of Politics and Production in Early Republican Cuba

This article traces the way that groups of armed men used force and violence to shape economic production and national politics in early twentieth-century Cuba. In the decades immediately after independence, Cuba underwent a series of transformations tied to US imperial control, the expansion of the sugar industry, and the rise of a diverse working class. The island was also the site of violent political conflicts over control of the state. Present in all of these processes were groups of armed men with conflicting ties to political authority and private enterprises. US soldiers, members of the Cuban army, and a militarized police force called the Rural Guard bore arms alongside private sugar company guards, volunteer militias, and vigilante groups to protect property, discipline workers, and wage political warfare. The use of violence by both state and non-state actors was symptomatic of larger ambiguities in the source of political power, the functioning of democracy, and the very existence of Cuban national sovereignty. This article employs the concept of paramilitarism to understand these processes. In Cuban politics, as in its economic production, there was never a perfect correlation between an armed man's relationship to the state and the legitimacy of his violence. But violence was not entirely random. Black individuals—both Cuban and immigrant—were most vulnerable to the paramilitary violence that went unpunished as it shaped the world of politics and production in the Cuban republic.

Black Labor, White Sugar: Caribbean Braceros and Their Struggle for Power in the Cuban Sugar Industry

Scholars have long recognized the importance of Haitian and British Caribbean migrants to early twentieth-century Cuba. Although they loomed large in Cuban racial debates and sustained one of the largest sugar industries in the world, the migrants themselves received disproportionately less attention than the analyses of racial ideologies, sugar production, and empire in which they were evidentiary fodder. With Black Labor, White Sugar, Philip Howard joins a growing group of scholars both within and outside Cuba who are analyzing migrants and migration more explicitly, a reflection of increased interest in Caribbean migration, transnational history, and Cuba outside Havana. Howard traces the racial and economic exploitation of the migrants and their varied efforts to assert control over their lives through the first decades of the twentieth century. In so doing, he makes new claims about the extent of migrants' labor organizing in the sugar industry and adds to ongoing historiographic debates about race and mobilization in the Cuban Republic.Howard explains migration to Cuba as a convergence, not just of economic and political conditions but also of racial debates and worker consciousness within Cuba. For students of race in Cuba, the 1913 legalization of Caribbean labor migration is second only to the 1912 violent repression of the all-black Partido Independiente de Color for what it reveals about ideas of race, citizenship, work, and political power in the Cuban Republic. Howard, more than any other previous scholar, posits an explicit connection between the two. He shows that an influential report on labor and migration by the Cuban Agricultural Department was written during the 1912 repression and actually made subtle references to the unfolding events as it recommended allowing Caribbean migration. From this perspective, immigrants were brought in not just according to the arithmetic of population and wage rates but also based on a calculus attuned to an emerging, assertive black Cuban consciousness.Howard's analysis of sugar workers follows the same logic. Planters employed the management tactics from slavery to successive groups of workers until economic crisis and Cuban xenophobic nationalism closed Cuban borders in the 1930s. Initially, Caribbean migrants were recruited amid rising Afro-Cuban mobilization. Soon, Howard argues, immigrant workers, especially Jamaicans, adopted the class consciousness of worker internationalism and anarcho-syndicalism, followed later by the race consciousness of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association. By the 1920s, poor economic conditions in Cuba reduced Jamaicans' willingness to migrate; likewise, their reputation for mobilization made them less desirable to sugar planters, who increasingly turned to Haitians, maintaining the pattern of employers hiring the most exploitable labor. Although he treats different immigrant groups separately, Howard suggests that when it came to their participation in formal organizations and efforts to assert autonomy workers of all nationalities participated.Black Labor, White Sugar was published on the heels of Robert Whitney and Graciela Chailloux Laffita's book on the British Caribbean presence in Cuba, but the texts focus on different themes. Howard goes into more depth about workers' experiences and ends with the deportations in the 1930s, whereas Whitney and Chailloux Laffita spend more time on British Caribbean migrants' identities and individual interactions with British imperial and Cuban national state structures, an analysis that focuses more on the process of repatriation and hovers more in the 1930s and subsequent decades.One of the biggest challenges in writing about migrants in the Cuban sugar industry is discerning the extent of their involvement in various labor organizations and their reception of radical ideologies. Organizations throughout Cuba published pamphlets invoking migrant workers in the eastern part of the island, but few sources provide any smoking guns about migrants' actual responses. Did field workers' cane fires represent a “nascent expression of the workers' consciousness” and a gesture of support to ongoing anarcho-syndicalist organizing (p. 141)? While in Cuba, did Marcus Garvey discuss the US occupation of Haiti, as he had in speeches elsewhere? If so, were any Haitian immigrants there to hear him and understand his speech? Did Haitian writer Jacques Roumain's 1944 fictional account of a Haitian cane cutter accurately reflect the class consciousness of workers a decade before? In each of these cases, Howard responds to the ambiguous and circumstantial evidence in the affirmative, albeit cautiously. He thus makes what are perhaps the strongest claims yet for immigrant workers' participation in formal unions and radicalism. Alongside other textured histories of labor and mobilization in eastern Cuba, Black Labor, White Sugar is sure to engender lively debate.

The ajiaco in Cuba and beyond

The ajiaco in Cuba and beyond

Review: Constitutional Modernism: Architecture and Civil Society in Cuba, 1933–1959, by Timothy Hyde

Timothy Hyde Constitutional Modernism: Architecture and Civil Society in Cuba, 1933–1959 Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, x + 371 pp., 11 color and 67 b/w illus. $31.50, ISBN 9780816678112 Through times of democracy and dictatorship, revolution and rebuilding, cultural actors in twentieth-century Cuba self-consciously constructed national traditions, synthesizing colonial anachronisms left after the island’s independence from Spain in 1898 with imported modernist innovations. Between the ouster of the infamous president-cum-dictator Gerardo Machado in 1933 and the revolution of 1959, a complex set of historic, social, and aesthetic conditions emerged that set modern architecture in dialogue with a developing discourse of civil society and constitutionalism. These were years of military rule under Fulgencio Batista, an autocrat who haunted the Cuban political landscape as a behind-the-scenes puppeteer, quasi-legitimate president, and eventually an unfettered dictator until Castro’s coup. Alongside politicians and civil servants, writers, artists, urbanists, and architects simultaneously struggled to define Cuba’s national identity. The resulting urban forms and social and legal histories are the subject of Timothy Hyde’s Constitutional Modernism . The book focuses in particular on modernist architecture and urbanism as forms of civic expression, and it deals almost exclusively with the capital city of Havana, which is understood as an urban metonym for the nation as a whole. It brings welcome complexity to discussions of mid-twentieth-century Cuban art and architecture, which are often framed in terms of design typologies. Bringing the social, civic, and architectural realms into dialogue with one another, Hyde asks, “How does architecture make its appearance in civil society?” (2). His thorough and scrupulous study charts the confluence of politics and architecture, anchored by the discourse of constitutionalism. The Cuban Constitution of 1940 aimed to establish a stable, independent republic, enacting a historical transition from colony to nation, a transition that many still believed incomplete. It is no small thing, then, for Hyde to claim that the principles and intentions of …

Sick Sunflowers, Santeria and Suffering: The Short Stories of Surama Ferrer

AbstractThe collection of twelve short stories published in 1953 by the little-known Cuban woman writer Surama Ferrer has attracted scant critical attention, despite its varied and disturbing content. With elements of the supernatural fused with santeria, the stories relate to the female life cycle in terms of birth, blood, menopause and death. Peppered with violent incidents, they contain shocking events including suicide and infanticide. Family relationships are characterized by fracture, bitterness and hatred, as if blood ties have no relevance. Why are these stories so dark and pessimistic in terms of gender and family relationships? What is the significance of allusions to santeria and the magical powers of the sunflower? This article will attempt to unpick the various themes and devices present in these stories, in an effort to draw conclusions about the stability of family and gender relationships in mid twentieth-century Cuba.ResumenLa colección de doce cuentos publicadas en 1953 por la poca conocida autora cubana Surama Ferrer no ha atraído mucha atención, a pesar de su contenido variado e inquietante. Con elementos de lo sobrenatural fundido con santería, los cuentos se relacionan con el círculo de vida femenina en cuanto al nacimiento, la sangre, la menopausia, y la muerte. Salpicados de episodios violentos, los cuentos contienen aspectos chocantes y bárbaros incluyendo suicidio y infanticidio. Las relaciones familiales se caracterizan por rotura, amargura y odio, como si los enlaces de sangre no contaran para nada. ¿Por qué son tán oscuros y pesimistos estos cuentos en términos de género y relaciones familiales? ¿Qué es el significado de las alusiones a la santería y al poder mágico del girasol? Este artículo intentará analizar sus temas y estrategemas para tirar conclusiones sobre la estabilidad de las relaciones familiares y de género en Cuba a mediados del siglo veinte.

Photographs of Early Twentieth-Century Cuba by Sumner W. Matteson

In February 1904, American itinerant photographer Sumner W. Matteson, a native of Decorah, Iowa, visited Cuba for about four months. He travelled extensively throughout the island and took over five hundred photographs. It was the first time Matteson had left the United States and, upon reaching the island, he headed into the countryside and began to photograph a wide range of individuals. Matteson's documentary work represents an image of Cuba that was relatively unknown in the United States at the time. His photographs cut across racial, gender, class, and geographic lines, and portrayed Matteson's subjects with a sense of pride and agency. This paper will argue that Matteson portrayed Cuba and its people with an intimacy unlike that of any photographer before him — this during the founding years of the republic, shortly after a four-year American occupation, and at a time when Cubans were seen as exotic others. The photographs reveal a multi-hued population of blacks, mulattoes, and whites, male and female — subjects rarely portrayed sensitively in photographs of the time. This paper will offer some suggestions as to why this white, Midwestern male photographer did not fall into the potentially exploitative trap of representing the Cuban people in the customary way. Matteson's images provide depictions of the Cuban people that had been previously absent, and offered a face of the rural subaltern consisting of both blacks and whites, working-class Cubans, and even a former Rebel Army leader — all less than twenty years after the abolition of slavery in Cuba in 1886.

Race and Income Inequality in Contemporary Cuba

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsAlejandro de la FuenteAlejandro de la Fuente is UCIS Research Professor of History and Latin American Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2008) and A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (University of North Carolina Press, 2001), and the editor of Queloides: Race and Racism in Cuban Contemporary Art (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011).

Guantánamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution

Guantánamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution

Empowered objects, powerless subjects: citizenship, religion, and political representation in twentieth-century Cuba

[First paragraph]Measures of Equality: Social Science, Citizenship, and Race in Cuba, 1902-1940. Alejandra Marina Bronfman. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xi + 234 pp. (Paper US$ 19.95)Afro-Cuban Religiosity, Revolution, and National Identity. Christine Ayorinde. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004. ix + 283 pp. (Cloth US$ 59.95)In the last ten years, research topics such as race and nation have been privileged areas for the historical and anthropological understanding of Caribbean and Latin American societies. Regarding Cuba in particular, social scientists have dedicated important scholarship to these issues by mapping conceptions of citizenship and political representation, while situating them within a broader debate on the making of the new postcolonial and republican society at the beginning of the twentieth century. By pursuing different aims and following distinct approaches, Alejandra Bronfman and Christine Ayorinde have made contributions to this academic literature. Through divergent theoretical and methodological perspectives, both of their books explore alternative ways of interpreting the making of the nation founded upon a multiple and fluid rhetoric of race.

Contributors

Other| November 01 2007 Contributors Hispanic American Historical Review (2007) 87 (4): v. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-87-4-v Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Contributors. Hispanic American Historical Review 1 November 2007; 87 (4): v. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-87-4-v Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsHispanic American Historical Review Search Advanced Search george reid andrews is UCIS Research Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800 – 1900, Blacks and Whites in São Paulo, Brazil, 1888 – 1988, and Afro-Latin America, 1800 – 2000. He is currently working on a history of Afro-Uruguayan social, cultural, and political movements, 1800 – 2000.alejandro de la fuente is Associate Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth Century Cuba (UNC Press, 2001), which was also published, in Spanish translation, by Editorial Colibrí in 2001, and the editor of “Su único derecho: Los esclavos y la ley,” a special issue of the journal Debate y Perspectivas, published in 2004. This article is part of a longer project on the legal history of slavery in Cuba.lyman... You do not currently have access to this content.

Anarchism and Countercultural Politics in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba

Anarchism and Countercultural Politics in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba

The Rise of Son and the Legitimization of African-Derived Culture in Cuba, 1908-1940

The Rise of Son and the Legitimization of African-Derived Cult ure in Cuba, 1908-1940 Glenn A. Chambers (bio) The rise of the Afro-Cuban musical genre commonly known as son is representative of Cuban society's ability to affirm through art its primary cultural influences: Europe and Africa. Despite the successful transculturation within the music, however, the events surrounding the creation and acceptance of son reiterate the struggle between Cuban elites and the masses to define lo cubano.1 While elites were looking to Europe and the United States for representations of culture and modernity, the black and mulatto masses were constructing an art form that ultimately gained acceptance worldwide and became a defining symbol of Cuban culture and identity. In many countries with large Afro-descent populations, culture has been the primary means by which these marginalized groups have been incorporated into the mainstream. This has often come as a result of the appropriation of African-derived culture by those of European descent, through such categories as dance, music, food, and religious practices. However, such practices are by no means an indication that the people who created the culture have achieved political, economic, and social gains within their respective societies. In many instances, the cultural practices of the black masses are accepted, while the originators of the culture continue to exist in the lower stratum of society. In this essay, I will show how the social and political conditions under which son became a representation of popular culture in Cuba served as a catalyst for the affirmation of Cuba's African roots, despite attempts on the part of the elite to exclude Afro-Cubans from establishing any connection to Cuban national identity. The Roots of Cuban Son Son came to be regarded as a highly sophisticated and culturally expressive popular art form in twentieth-century Cuba, despite historically originating from the most marginalized and disenfranchised group in Cuban society: the black masses. While mulattoes and poor whites contributed to the development of the music on various levels, it is the African-derived traditions of the black masses that constituted the foundation and early inspiration of son. These traditions had their origins in the many African nations and ethnicities transplanted to Cuba against their will throughout the duration of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. African traditions were transformed within the plantation environment, and retained in the Afro-Cuban cabildos de nación. The historian Philip Howard affirms that [End Page 497] these mutual-aid societies met in private and, because of their spatial distance from church officials, became very attractive to Afro-Cubans. The cabildos allowed them the means to enjoy much more religious autonomy than the Catholic-controlled cofradías, or religious fraternities (Howard 27). This religious autonomy was in many ways synonymous with cultural autonomy, in that cabildos proved to be a fertile ground for the nurturing of the Afro-Cuban musical tradition. The enslavement of Africans in Cuba, as in most areas where the institution was prevalent, played a pivotal role in the development and retention of African culture among the enslaved population. Robert Jameson, in his Letters from the Havana During the Year 1820, writes: "none of the enslaved Africans have acquired an indigenous character; the African soil from which they were torn still clings to them, neither washed off in the font of baptism or stream of knowledge" (20). Jameson's observation, that Africans still clung to their traditions despite being enslaved, advances the notion that African culture was strong during the period. Apart from Jameson's questioning of the civilized qualities of Africans, the description of festivals is reminiscent of some African religious ceremonies. This is important in explaining the cultural retentions of Afro-Cubans, because through detribalization efforts the Spanish colonial government attempted to supplant African cultures with that of the colonizer (Smallwood 191–92). This led to a clustering of traditions in which various African cultures blended with European culture, and allowed for the maintenance of many distinctly African traditions, which manifested themselves most notably in Afro-Cuban musical traditions such as son. While the African ethnic groups represented in Afro-Cuban cabildos were numerous, four groups are recognized as having...

Anarchism and Countercultural Politics in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba. By Kirwin R. Shaffer. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. Pp. xi, 279. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $59.95 cloth.

Anarchism and Countercultural Politics in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba. By Kirwin R. Shaffer. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. Pp. xi, 279. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $59.95 cloth. - Volume 63 Issue 3

The Myth of José Martí: Conflicting Nationalisms in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba (review)

Lillian Guerra. Myth of Jose Marti: Conflicting Nationalisms in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. 310 pp.Lillian Guerra' s superbly documented and written book, Myth of Jose Marti, takes the reader on a breathtaking historical journey through the politics of power in the early Cuban Republic (1902-1921). Guerra offers an in-depth interdisciplinary analysis on class, race, culture, and gender, as well as on hemispheric relations during the first Cuban administrations, including the U.S. occupation (1898-1902) and the U.S. provisional government (1906-1909), in the context of what different political groups viewed as Jose Marti's legacy, particularly his of social (6).As Guerra points out, the two-party system that dominated Cuban politics in the early Republic perpetuated the social chasm of the colonial era, although now associated with the rise to power of the Cuban bourgeoisie. Working-class Cubans, black and white, male and female, were excluded from the benefits of independence, in particular the widely anticipated possibility of a more equitable society. A sentence in Marti's well-known essay Our America (1891), which Guerra discusses at length, foreshadows the cultural destiny of the Republic: The colony continued living in the Republic.The Cuban nation, as well as the Republic, may be considered an imagined community, according to the ideas about nationalism proposed by Benedict Anderson and elaborated by Patha Chatterjee, Eric Habshawn, and Florence Mallon. As an imagined community, the Cuban nation appears in early foundational texts such as the poem Espejo de paciencia (1608) by Silvestre de Balboa, or even the legend of the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, which may have inspired the idea of national identity in the novel Sab (1841) by Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda. These texts showed an alternative multicultural path to Cuban identity. Cuba, however, ultimately achieved independence in large part because of Marti's strategic discourse on national identity, whose genealogy the writer traced back to the first war of independence (1868-1878). Marti's discourse on national identity was both cultural and political. myth, according to Guerra, developed precisely around the idea of national unity that Marti constructed and put into practice as part of his political strategy to gain independence. His vision was based on notions of self-abnegation, mediation of differences, and material denial for the sake of a collective end (24). Guerra explains how after Marti's death, Cuban political groups whose ideas were more often than not in conflict with each other, used Marti as a validating symbol to pursue their own interests.Guerra distinguishes three types of nationalism forged during the 1895 revolution of independence and divided along social, ethnic, and cultural lines. With close ties to the United States, proimperialist nationalism - an otherwise unusual combination of terms - served the interests of the upper echelons of the Cuban bourgeoisie. As Guerra points out, class was not the only determinant of power for the elite (20); race and culture also were co-determinants. conservative governments of Estrada Palma (1902-1906) and General Mario Menocal (1913-1921) are examples of pro-imperialist nationalists that envisioned the Cuban nation as white and of Spaniard descent, and considered the United States and Europe as models of modernization.Revolutionary nationalism, the second type of nationalism outlined by Guerra, was associated with liberal leaders of independence, such as General Maximo Gomez and activist Juan Gualberto Gomez. Revolutionary nationalists were more racially inclusive than proimperialists; however, class and race also became major factors for revolutionary nationalists when the labor movement challenged the liberal government of Jose Miguel Gomez (1909-1913). At the bottom of the sociocultural pyramid, black and white workers, cigarmakers, stevedores, and the rank and file of the wars of independence embodied popular nationalism, which strived for equality and social justice. …