• Introduction: race and revolution in Cuba
• Not blacks, but citizens: racial rhetoric and the 1959 revolution
• The black citizen of the future: Afro-Cuban activists and the 1959 revolution
• From Miami to New York and beyond: race and exile in the 1960s
• Cuba calls!: exploiting African American and Cuban alliances for equal rights
• Poor, black, and a teacher: loyal black revolutionaries and the literacy campaign
• Epilogue: a revolution inside of the revolution: Afro-Cuban experiences after 1961.

Analyzing the ideology and rhetoric around race in Cuba and south Florida during the early years of the Cuban revolution, Devyn Spence Benson argues that ideas, stereotypes, and discriminatory practices relating to racial difference persisted despite major efforts by the Cuban state to generate social equality. Drawing on Cuban and U.S. archival materials and face-to-face interviews, Benson examines 1960s government programs and campaigns against discrimination, showing how such programs frequently negated their efforts by reproducing racist images and idioms in revolutionary propaganda, cartoons, and school materials.Building on nineteenth-century discourses that imagined Cuba as a raceless space, revolutionary leaders embraced a narrow definition of blackness, often seeming to suggest that Afro-Cubans had to discard their blackness to join the revolution. This was and remains a false dichotomy for many Cubans of color, Benson demonstrates. While some Afro-Cubans agreed with the revolution's sentiments about racial transcendence-""not blacks, not whites, only Cubans-others found ways to use state rhetoric to demand additional reforms. Still others, finding a revolution that disavowed blackness unsettling and paternalistic, fought to insert black history and African culture into revolutionary nationalisms. Despite such efforts by Afro-Cubans and radical government-sponsored integration programs, racism has persisted throughout the revolution in subtle but lasting ways.
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• Producing place: Colonialism and governance in the early modern Caribbean
• Place
• Modern Space
• City
• Empire's end
• North Americans in Havana
• Conclusion: Across the Atlantic and back.

This is one of the earliest and most important port cities in the New World, Havana quickly became a model for the planning and construction of other colonial cities. Beyond the Walled City tells the story of how Havana was conceived, built, and managed. Examining imperial efforts to police urban space from the late sixteenth century onward, Guadalupe Garcia shows how the production of urban space was explicitly centered on the politics of racial exclusion and social control. Connecting colonial governing practices to broader debates on urbanization, the regulation of public spaces, and the racial dislocation of urban populations, Beyond the Walled City points to the ways in which colonialism is inscribed on modern topographies.
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• Part I. Gender, Law, and Urban Slavery
• Sites of Enslavement, Spaces of Freedom : Slavery and Abolition in the Atlantic Cities of Havana and Rio de Janeiro
• The Law Is Final, Excellent Sir : Slave Law, Gender, and Gradual Emancipation
• Part II. Seeking Freedom
• As a Slave Woman and as a Mother : Law, Jurisprudence, and Rhetoric in Stories from Women's Claims-Making
• Exaggerated and Sentimental? : Engendering Abolitionism in the Atlantic World
• I Wish to Be in This City : Women and the Quest for Urban Freedom
• Part III. Conceiving Freedom
• Enlightened Mothers of Families or Competent Domestic Servants? : Elites Imagine the Meanings of Freedom
• She Was Now a Free Woman : Ex-Slave Women and the Meanings of Urban Freedom
• My Mother Was Free-Womb, She Wasn't a Slave : Conceiving Freedom
• Conclusion
• Epilogue: Conceiving Citizenship.

In Conceiving Freedom, Camillia Cowling shows how gender shaped urban routes to freedom for the enslaved during the process of gradual emancipation in Cuba and Brazil, which occurred only after the rest of Latin America had abolished slavery and even after the American Civil War. Focusing on late nineteenth-century Havana and Rio de Janeiro, Cowling argues that enslaved women played a dominant role in carving out freedom for themselves and their children through the courts. Cowling examines how women, typically illiterate but with access to scribes, instigated myriad successful petitions for emancipation, often using "free-womb" laws that declared that the children of enslaved women were legally free. She reveals how enslaved women's struggles connected to abolitionist movements in each city and the broader Atlantic World, mobilizing new notions about enslaved and free womanhood. She shows how women conceived freedom and then taught the "free-womb" generation to understand and shape the meaning of that freedom. Even after emancipation, freed women would continue to use these claims-making tools as they struggled to establish new spaces for themselves and their families in post emancipation society.
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• Preface: A Crucible of Race: Historicizing the Sexual Economy of Cuban Social Identities Acknowledgments
• 1. Ascendant Capitalism and White Intellectual Re-Assessments ofAfro-Cuban Social Value to 1820
• 2. Slavery and Afro-Cuban Family Formation during Cuba's Economic Awakening, 1763-1820
• 3. The Illegal Slave Trade and the Cuban Sexual Economy of Race, 1820-1867
• 4. Nineteenth-Century Racial Myths and the Familial Corruption of CubanWhiteness
• 5. Afro-Cuban Family Emancipation, 1868-1886
• 6. "Regenerating" the Afro-Cuban Family, 1886-1940
• 7. Mestizaje Literary Visions and Afro-Cuban Genealogical Memory, 1920-1958 Epilogue: Revolutionary Social Morality and the Multi-Racial National Family, 1959-2000 Notes References Index.
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Since the 19th century, assertions of a common, racially-mixed Cuban identity based on acceptance of African descent have challenged the view of Cubans as racially white. For the past two centuries, these competing views of Cuban racial identity have remained in continuous tension, while Cuban women and men make their own racially oriented choices in family formation. Cuba's Racial Crucible explores the historical dynamics of Cuban race relations by highlighting the racially selective reproductive practices and genealogical memories associated with family formation. Karen Y. Morrison reads archival, oral-history, and literary sources to demonstrate the ideological centrality and inseparability of "race, " "nation, " and "family, " in definitions of Cuban identity. Morrison analyzes the conditions that supported the social advance and decline of notions of white racial superiority, nationalist projections of racial hybridity, and pride in African descent.
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• Introduction : making diaspora in the shadow of empire and Jim Crow
• Forging diaspora in the midst of empire : the Tuskegee-Cuba connection
• Un dios, un fin, un destino : enacting diaspora in the Garvey movement
• Blues and son from Harlem to Havana
• Destination without humiliation : Black travel within the routes of discrimination.

Documenting diaspora among neighbors Cuba's geographic proximity to the United States and its centrality to U.S. imperial designs following the War of 1898 led to the creation of a unique relationship between Afro-descended populations in the two countries. In "Forging Diaspora", Frank Andre Guridy shows that the cross-national relationships nurtured by Afro-Cubans and black Americans helped to shape the political strategies of both groups as they attempted to overcome a shared history of oppression and enslavement. Drawing on archival sources in both countries, Guridy traces four encounters between Afro-Cubans and African Americans. These hidden histories of cultural interaction - of Cuban students attending Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute, the rise of Garveyism, the Havana-Harlem cultural connection during the Harlem Renaissance and Afro-Cubanism movement, and the creation of black travel networks during the Good Neighbor and early Cold War eras - illustrate the significance of cross-national linkages to the ways both Afro-descended populations negotiated the entangled processes of U.S. imperialism and racial discrimination. As a result of these relationships, argues Guridy, Afro-descended people in Cuba and the United States came to identify themselves as part of a transcultural African diaspora.
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• Acknowledgments; Abbreviations; Introduction; PART I: The First Republic, 1902-1933; 1 Racial Order or Racial Democracy?: Race and the Contending Notions of Cubanidad; 2 Electoral Politics; PART II: Inequality, 1900-1950s; 3 The Labor Market; 4 Education and Mobility; PART III: The Second Republic, 1933-1958; 5 A New Cuba?; 6 State and Racial Equality; PART IV: Socialism, 1959-1990s; 7 Building a Nation for All; 8 The Special Period; Epilogue; Notes; Bibliography; Index; A; B; C; D; E; F; G; H; I; J; K; L; M; N; O; P; Q; R; S; T; U; V; W; Y; Z.

After 30 years of anti-colonial struggle against Spain and four years of military occupation by the United States, Cuba formally became an independent republic in 1902. The nationalist coalition that fought for Cuba's freedom, a movement in which blacks and mulattoes were well-represented, had envisioned an egalitarian and inclusive country - a nation for all, as Jose Marti described it. But did the Cuban republic, and later the Cuban revolution, live up to these expectations? Tracing the formation and reformulation of nationalist ideologies, government policies, and different forms of social and political mobilization in republican and post-revolutionary Cuba, de la Fuente explores the opportunities and limitations that Afro-Cubans experienced in such areas as job access, education and political representation. Challenging assumptions of both underlying racism and racial democracy, he contends that racism and anti-racism co-existed within Cuban Nationalism and in turn, Cuban society. This coexistence has persisted into the 21st century, despite significant efforts by the revolutionary government to improve the lot of the poor and build a nation truly for all.
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• Africans in colonial Cuba
• Rural slave networks and insurgent geographies
• The 1843 rebellions in Matanzas
• To raise a rebellion in Matanzas: the urban connection, 1841-1843
• And the women also knew: the gendered terrain of insurgency
• The anatomy of a rural movement
• African Cuban sacred traditions and the making of an insurgency.

Envisioning La Escalera--an underground rebel movement largely composed of Africans living on farms and plantations in rural western Cuba--in the larger context of the long emancipation struggle in Cuba, Aisha Finch demonstrates how organized slave resistance became critical to the unraveling not only of slavery but also of colonial systems of power during the nineteenth century.While the discovery of La Escalera unleashed a reign of terror by the Spanish colonial powers in which hundreds of enslaved people were tortured, tried, and executed, Finch revises historiographical conceptions of the movement as a fiction conveniently invented by the Spanish government in order to target anticolonial activities. Connecting the political agitation stirred up by free people of color in the urban centers to the slave rebellions that rocked the countryside, Finch shows how the rural plantation was connected to a much larger conspiratorial world outside the agrarian sector. While acknowledging the role of foreign abolitionists and white creoles in the broader history of emancipation, Finch teases apart the organization, leadership, and effectiveness of the black insurgents in midcentury dissident mobilizations that emerged across western Cuba, presenting compelling evidence that black women played a particularly critical role.
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• Dead cities and other forms of protest, 1952-1955
• The domestication of violence, 1955-1958
• Maternalism and the moral authority of revolution, 1956-1958
• The new woman and the old Left, 1959-1960
• From the consumer's revolution to the economic war, 1959-1962
• The destruction and salvation of the Cuban family, 1959-1962.

A handful of celebrated photographs show armed, fatigues-clad female Cuban insurgents alongside their companeros in Cuba's remote mountains during the revolutionary struggle. However, the story of women's part in the struggle's success only now receives comprehensive consideration in Michelle Chase's history of women and gender politics in revolutionary Cuba. Restoring to history women's participation in the all-important urban insurrection, and resisting Fidel Castro's triumphant claim that women's emancipation was handed to them as a ""revolution within the revolution, "" Chase's work demonstrates that women's activism and leadership was critical at every stage of the revolutionary process.Tracing changes in political attitudes alongside evolving gender ideologies in the years leading up to the revolution, Chase describes how insurrectionists mobilized familiar gendered notions, such as masculine honor and maternal sacrifice, in ways that strengthened the coalition against Fulgencio Batista. But, after 1959, the mobilization of women and the societal transformations that brought more women and young people into the political process opened the revolutionary platform to increasingly urgent demands for women's rights. In many cases, Chase shows, the revolutionary government was simply formalizing popular initiatives already in motion on the ground thanks to women with a more radical vision of their rights.
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• "Very prejudicial" : free people of color in a slave society
• Spectacles of power : repressing the conspiracy of La Escalera
• Calculated expulsions : free people of color in Mexico, the U.S., Spain, and North Africa
• Acts of excess and insubordination : resisting the tranquility of terror
• The rise and fall of the militia of color : from the constitution of 1812 to the Escalera era
• Balancing acts : the shifting dynamics of race and immigration.

Michele Reid-Vazquez reveals the untold story of the strategies of negotia tion used by free blacks in the aftermath of the "Year of the Lash"--a wave of repression in Cuba that had great implications for the Atlantic World in the next two decades. At dawn on June 29, 1844, a firing squad in Havana executed ten accused ringleaders of the Conspiracy of La Escalera, an alleged plot to abolish slavery and colonial rule in Cuba. The condemned men represented prominent members of Cuba's free community of African descent, including the acclaimed poet Pl cido (Gabriel de la Concepci n Vald s). In an effort to foster a white majority and curtail black rebellion, Spanish colonial authorities also banished, imprisoned, and exiled hundreds of free blacks, dismantled the militia of color, and accelerated white immigration projects. Scholars have debated the existence of the Conspiracy of La Escalera for over a century, yet little is known about how those targeted by the violence responded. Drawing on archival material from Cuba, Mexico, Spain, and the United States, Reid-Vazquez provides a critical window into under standing how free people of color challenged colonial policies of terror and pursued justice on their own terms using formal and extralegal methods. Whether rooted in Cuba or cast into the Atlantic World, free men and women of African descent stretched and broke colonial expectations of their codes of conduct locally and in exile. Their actions underscored how black agency, albeit fragmented, worked to destabilize repression's impact.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)