Ever Faithful: Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba by David Sartorius (review)

The Latin Americanist, September 2014 of Poyo and his exile community in Key West and its struggle for Cuban independence from Spain. One will never know if the revolutionary activities of Cuban exiles such as Poyo would have brought to fruition the third major attempt at Cuban liberation from Spanish colonial rule during the second half of the nineteenth century. The United States declared war on Spain in 1898, the third year of the violent national liberation movement against Spain. It was, much to the chagrin of nationalists such as Poyo, the American defeat of Spain that resulted in Cuban independence, not the efforts by Cuban nationalists. In addition to being of interest to Cuban scholars, the book should be of special interest to those studying Latino exile communities in the United States. Most likely, the author’s desire that this book inspire his granddaughters “to learn more about their Cuban heritage” will transpire (xiii). Michael R. Hall Department of History Armstrong Atlantic State University EVER FAITHFUL: RACE, LOYALTY, AND THE ENDS OF EMPIRE IN SPANISH CUBA. By David Sartorius. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013, p. 312, $24.95 Based on extensive archival evidence in three countries and an impressive array of rare Cuban periodicals, David Sartorius’s Ever Faithful is the first historical account to explore the ways in which black Cuban men and women laid claim to political inclusion from within the boundaries of the Spanish empire. Coherently contextualizing the Cuban case amidst broader Caribbean patterns of loyalty, Sartorius provides a much needed counterpoint to the conventional historiographical conflation of black history with anti-colonial struggle, thereby challenging the assumption that revolution was the only legitimate political action for blacks in nineteenth-century Cuba. Indeed, he argues that people of African descent , free and enslaved, appropriated and deployed discourses of loyalty to claim inclusion in colonial politics, even while still facing persisting inequalities (xi). This textured account of alternative political strategies and evolving usages of loyalism among black Cubans defies generalizations that have defined much of the scholarship on nineteenth- and early-twentieth century Cuba: namely, that loyalism was the exclusive domain of wealthy whites, and that separatism always commanded the sympathy of the island’s black population. As such, this book exposes the limitations of teleological and politically-driven attempts to project black claims for inclusion in the early republic onto their supposed history of military service in the Cuban Army. Sartorius reveals that a nuanced appreciation of the diversity of political strategies employed by different groups of African-descended people at specific historical moments can actually help 74 Book Reviews validate a broader array of black historical experiences. In this way, the historical perspective presented in Ever Faithful simultaneously makes a cogent political statement aimed at unshackling black claims to citizenship from their historical contingency on overt demonstrations of patriotism. The strengths of this account are further enhanced by the author’s careful attention to the geographical variation that has defined Cuban history and his innovative incorporation of women into conventionally male-centric political narratives. First, while most monographs on Cuba erroneously tend to focus on Havana as a representation of national patterns , Sartorius employs three main geographic centers—Havana, Santiago and Cienfuegos—to construct a more nuanced picture of national experience. He weaves each vignette of loyalism onto a comprehensive backdrop of the local context in which it occurred, thereby highlighting national patterns as well as local idiosyncrasies. Second, he includes women in discussions of nineteenth-century political subjectivities. Here, the author demonstrates his skill in navigating the archive and his conceptual innovation by expanding implicitly masculine notions of citizenship to encompass women’s actions and political agendas . Aside from Teresa Prados-Torreira’s Mambisas (University of Florida, 2005), an account of female participation in the anti-colonial struggle, Ever Faithful is the only book to analyze female military action in Cuba in any depth. Sartorius reveals the active contribution of African-descended women to the Spanish side of the conflict, a historical reality that had rarely if ever appeared in narratives of this period (118–121). In another section, he examines the attempts of black Cuban women to claim citizenship through familial and educational...