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  • Ever Faithful: Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba by David Sartorius
  • William C. Van Norman Jr.
David Sartorius. Ever Faithful: Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. 312 pp.

David Sartorius has written an important book that challenges much of the standard narrative regarding people of color in Cuba during the nineteenth century. This rich analysis sustains a compelling and nuanced argument that will reshape what we know about race in Cuba during the nineteenth century. Sartorius convincingly contends that there were significant numbers of people of African descent who were loyal to Spain, participants in an ever-shifting relationship in which Spanish leaders unevenly sought their support and rewarded their loyalty. The author uses key events of Spanish imperial and Cuban colonial history to structure the six chapters. Each begins with an event that the author uses as a lens to explicate the context, actors, motivations, and implications of each moment. This facilitates the introduction of dozens of African-descended people, slave and free, loyal and rebel, and places them at the center of Cuban colonial history. While this book has a strong narrative structure, it is also theoretically informed, as the author draws on numerous sources to show how positions of loyalty or disloyalty to the Crown of Spain affected understandings of race and the status of people of color.

In a brief introduction, the author establishes for the reader his argument and methodological concerns, and summarizes the chapters. Each part balances discussion of enslaved and free African-descended Cubans, revealing the complexity of race on the island. Sartorius also works to avoid the teleological position of only tracing events and participants that led to the ending of slavery and Cuban independence. His approach is both important and well executed, allowing the reader to fully grasp the ideas of people living in an empire and the possibilities and choices that existed for them, rather than only highlighting the road taken.

In discussing the first half of the nineteenth century, Sartorius contrasts differing attitudes regarding the population of color between the leadership in Spain and elites in Cuba. There were ongoing debates on the peninsula about race and citizenship, while on the island the focus was on the question of slavery. This is highlighted by the role of Cuban deputy to the Cortes, Andrés de Jáuregui, who effectively killed the abolition debate by invoking the French debates on abolition that he claimed sparked the Haitian Revolution. Two factors contributed to attenuated freedoms for most people of color in the years leading up to the Ten Years’ War. Continued debates over slavery along with significant slave rebellions, such as those associated with the mass, state-led campaign of repression known as La Escalera in 1844, created a perceived need to limit opportunities of interaction and participation for all people of color, slave and free. [End Page 229]

The first important challenge to the colonial government and imperial control in Cuba came from planters who understood that slavery was deeply tied to Spanish power. Using different strategies, both Spain and the rebels were able to attract significant numbers of African-descended Cubans to their struggle. Sartorius shows how ideas of citizenship and the loyalty of many people of color resulted in freedom for many slaves who assisted Spain. The rebels, relying on a similar rhetoric of citizenship, also freed slaves who came to their cause.

The Pact of Zanjón in 1878 gave way to increased freedom of association and of the press for all. People of color seized such opportunities, establishing new branches of social and political clubs and several black newspapers. The importance of associations, cabildos, and cofradías grew, but there was a cost to these new opportunities. Members of these associations felt pressed to give up “primitive” practices, conform to Spanish colonial norms, and render apolitical any public expression of a shared identity or mutual interest. This resulted in limited opportunities for dissent.

During the 1880s, both discourse and political actions reflected concerns over voting rights for men of color as well as over final emancipation. Loyalist actions were complex...

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