Taken together, Ada Ferrer's Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898, and Alejandro de la Fuente's "Race and Equality in Cuba, 1899-1981," provide a complete picture of one issue essential to Cuban history. Ferrer explores the hopes of nationalists for racial equality as they fought against Spanish colonial rule, while de la Fuente shows how those hopes were only partly realized after independence. As with most political and social movements based on idealism to a certain degree, the Cuban revolution did alter the sociopolitical landscape, but not nearly as significantly as they would have hoped.
Ferrer's book is rooted in the historical archives of Cuba, the United States, and Spain. It gives a full portrait of the importance of race in the movement for Cuban liberation under Spain in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, decades, which saw three wars fought in attempts to throw off the Spanish rulers.
Among the goals of the revolutionaries was the establishment of a society, which did not discriminate against individuals based on their race. De la Fuente, on the other hand, shows that once independence was won, this ideal goal was only partly manifested in post-colonial rule. He seems to argue, in contrast to Ferrer, that there is an inherent element of racism in Cuban culture that exists alongside the desire, goal or value of racial justice and harmony.
Ferrer also argues that the historical record is too often focused on the role of the United States in the final and
crucial years of the last century, when Spain's dominance was finally overthrown. Not only is this inaccurate, the author says, but it diminishes the actual role played by Cubans as well as
the efficacy of the entire independence movement of the Cuban people.
Ferrer goes on to show the sustained and determined effort of the Cuban people in their long struggle for freedom, and the reader comes to believe that once ...