Espacios, silencios y los sentidos de la libertad: Cuba entre 1878 y 1912 (review)

As U.S. government policy toward Cuba hardens, this book is welcome evidence of the potential for collaboration between Cuban and U.S. scholars that can be realized through increasingly open travel, research, and discussion. Nine of the collection's contributors are based in Cuba, seven in the United States, and one in Germany; all the non-Cubans did archival research in Cuba and the United States, while four of the Cubans worked in United States as well as Cuban archives. The book is a testament to the productive contact between the two societies, and tribute to Rebecca Scott's nurturance of such contact. Its impact inside Cuba may be greater than outside, but it is a valuable companion to recent monographs on Cuba published in English. Originating in a workshop and seminar held in Cienfuegos in the late 1990s and funded by the University of Michigan's Cuban Regional Archives Project, Harvard's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the Cienfuegos Provincial Archive, and the MacArthur and Reynolds Foundations, the book enriches both regional and national historiographies of Cuba. Although eight essays are grouped under the rubric of "Race and Nation," four of those are studies of the Cienfuegos region and form a nice political complement to the strong economic focus of the section formally dedicated to the region. Scott's opening essay, too, uses the case of a Cienfuegos man's experience of abolition, the war for independence, and its aftermath, to raise questions about the relationship among struggles for personal, racial, and national freedoms.

Such questions of transition—from war to peace, from slave to wage labor and capitalist expansion, from colony to early republic—inform many of the essays and define the book's temporal scope. Beginning with the end of the Ten Years' War and ending with the Liberal government's annihilation of the Independent Party of Color, the essays address a dense period in Cuban history, tracing important continuities and changes.

A benefit of the collection's regional focus is that microhistorical and subaltern methodologies yield a concrete sense of how race and power articulated both in the anticolonial struggles of the late 1800s and in the post-1902 period of nation building. Alejandro de la Fuente's optimism about Afro-Cubans' ability to manipulate the national doctrine of racial equality is richly suggested in analyses of Ricardo Batrell's writings by Fernando Martínez Heredia and Blancamar León Rosabal. However, de la Fuente's conclusion that racial equality progressed through the electoral system sits uneasily with the evidence of republican caciquismo and clientelism in Cienfuegos presented by Jorge Ibarra Cuesta, Michael Zeuske, and Alejandra Bronfman. Their findings flush with those of Hernán Venegas Delgado and Fe Iglesias García concerning the region's pattern of small farms and dominant centrales, a pattern that lent itself to what Zeuske calls a "pact between the new political class and Hispanic-Cuban capital" (p. 226). Ongoing struggles to create a nation by and for all were, at least in Cienfuegos, informed as much by personal networks as by ideological principle, even if those networks were forged in a joint struggle for and in Cuba Libre. This helps to explain why most Afro-Cubans did not join the Independent Party of Color, instead remaining within the web of patronage spun by the Liberal Party, which promised racial equality and was—as de la Fuente rightly emphasizes—negotiable from below.

Martínez Heredia's introduction claims that the crux of the collection is the study of "people without history," "those from below," "the subaltern classes," (p. 14); indeed, most contributors offer fresh glimpses of Cuban non-elites while remaining careful about how much analytical weight their documents can bear. There...