A Review of Colonial Reckoning. Race and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

Colonial Reckoning. Race and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Cuba is the latest work by historian Louis A. Pérez Jr., whose broad academic interests have mainly revolved around the island’s culture, identity, historiography and political economy, as much as its conflicted albeit intimate relationship with the United States. All these topics are somewhat present in the book, in which he offers an engaging retelling of Cuba’s bloody wars of independence during the second half of the 19th century —decades after continental Latin America had wrested full political sovereignty from Spain, organizing itself in various autonomous republics.  

Colonial Reckoning. Race and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Cuba by Louis A. Pérez Jr. (Duke University Press, 2023, 278 pages)

Pérez successfully complicates long-held and relatively unquestioned historiographical assumptions while foregrounding a series of frequently overlooked factors: the precarious balance of political, economic and social forces undergirding Spain’s authority over Cuba, whose rich sugar plantations hinged on the maintenance of chattel slavery; the crucial role played by particular emotions, fear and hope above all, either in justifying unequal colonial arrangements or in mobilizing inchoate understandings of what a Cuban nation, and a fortiori a Cuban identity —“lo cubano”— might mean. He presents us with an astounding multiplicity of voices, interests and racialized perceptions discernible in a wide range of contemporaneous primary sources, a testament to the sense of possibility with which Cubans of all shapes and sizes envisioned their political future. The seldomly acknowledged guerrillas, for instance, who fought willingly in the service of Spain’s counterinsurgent strategy in the island, are given the importance they deserve. Pérez’ book, in short, manages to enrich a somewhat petrified historical narrative, adding subtlety and ambiguity to an inherited, mythical tale of heroes and villains drawn mostly in black and white. 

After a brief introduction that spells out what “rethinking the paradigm of national formation” entails —visibilizing first-person experiences, questioning historical misconceptions, and disputing nationalistic narratives—, Pérez plunges into a comprehensive description of how Cuba’s plantation economy was sustained by a politics of fear that served to legitimate Spain’s sovereignty over the island. By the first decades of the 19th century, Cuba had overtaken post-revolutionary Haiti as the world’s primary exporter of sugar, issuing forth “a time of dazzling prosperity and the amassing of great fortunes” (13). As Pérez reminds us, “everything had something to do with sugar, to which almost everything was subordinated, and for which nothing was spared” (14).  

Such prosperity, however, was contingent upon a dehumanizing Faustian pact whereby affluence relied on “the coerced labor of newly enslaved Africans on a scale unprecedented in the nineteenth century.” Soon enough, the “endless waves of human cargo” triggered an upsurge of racial apprehensions and demographic anxieties (15). The Cuban “producing classes,” as Pérez labels them, dreaded the prospect of any revolution whatsoever, having taken note of the violent excesses in both the Latin American continent and Haiti, where emancipated slaves had exacted merciless revenge against their former masters. Wary of abolitionism and aware of their numerical inferiority, they quickly came to realize that “the price of independence… far exceeded the cost of colonialism” (16). In one of the many paradoxical situations savvily highlighted by Pérez, the producing classes were caught in a “history with no exit” (31), a veritable cul-de-sac: by acquiescing in the relentless expansion of slavery, they had placed themselves in thrall of a self-reinforcing system of exploitation that enabled as much as threatened, simultaneously and in direct proportion, their very existence. 

If the unthinkable were to be avoided or at least postponed, the Cuban producing classes required the presence of an external power able to guarantee the stability of the plantation system and the perpetuation of racial hierarchies. For Spain, caught in its own cul-de-sac, this was not an easy task, as its prolonged dominion over the island was being called into question: apart from intermittent slave revolts, the desirability of an eventual annexation to the United States had spread among certain Cubans, drawn to the northern republic’s convenient “accommodation between democratic ideals and chattel slavery” (31).  

In response to these cumulative threats, determined to maintain its hold over the island —a matter of economic but also symbolic importance, for the loss of Cuba would represent Spain’s final collapse as a colonial power—, Madrid was willing to go as far as to threaten “the producing classes with the abolition of slavery as a means to foreclose annexation” (37). Just as racially-motivated terrors prompted some Cubans to rely on an outside authority, so did Spain learn “to exploit creole fear as a usable method of colonial governance” (36). The politics of fear, therefore, suffused and regulated Cuban colonial society, ensuring a modicum of economic well-functioning. In this regard, Pérez’ book succeeds in demonstrating how a psychologically cunning, top-down emotional management lies at the root of long-lasting hegemonic structures and the oppressive ideologies that accompany and, more often than not, outlast them.  

Having established the historical background, Colonial Reckoning goes on to recount how this precarious colonial pact fell apart. In its longest and most extensive chapters, the book covers the 1868-78 “Ten-Year War,” as well as the Cuban War of Independence proper, which took place from 1895 to 1898 and was brought to an abrupt end by U.S. intervention. Initiated in the eastern part of the island where Spain’s authority was weaker and the geography forbidding, both wars —distinct though closely interrelated conflicts— were the product of disaffected populations that, organized in multiclass and multiracial realignments, saw “no ready way out and no apparent way up… other than the hope that things would be better on a nation of their own” (41).  

Aside from hate, directed towards the peninsular oppressors, the revolutionaries mobilized hope, aspiring for a better, self-governing future, challenging the hegemonic politics of fear while imagining a multi-racial ideal of “lo cubano.” Emotions, moreover, were inextricably tied to perceptions, which Pérez identifies in a rich variety of sources such as newspapers, memoirs, diaries, battle reports, circulating images and even novels and popular poems. With its particular attention to language and its political versatility, his book offers a truly polyphonic chorus of contemporaneous voices that bear witness to the era’s conflicting aspirations, desires, and national projects: “la nación integral” of the mambises, for instance, is contrasted with its peninsular counterpart, “la integridad de la nación.”  

Through his somewhat circular, reiterative writing style —which may seem, here and there, a bit excessive—, Pérez shows not only how emotions and perceptions reciprocally influenced each other but also how they exerted a decisive influence on the actual, military course of both wars. They were brutal, blood-soaked affairs, haunted by the “specter of Haiti” and its long-lasting imagery of racialized barbarism. Apart from the revolutionaries’ ingenious tactics —“small mobile units” setting ablaze property and production, exposing the colonial authority’s inability to safeguard the plantation economy—, Colonial Reckoning examines the stratagems adopted by the desperate Spanish military, time and again overwhelmed by persistently low morale, lethal tropical diseases and the unforgiving climate.  

Pérez focuses, in particular, on how the Peninsular fighting forces “outsourced” their personnel by recruiting the infamous counter-insurgency “guerrilleros,” local Cubans hired to engage in irregular warfare against the rebels. As a result, both conflicts ended up acquiring the traits of de facto civil wars in which opposing views of freedom, nationality and Cuban-ness faced each other. “Victory or death” became the guiding mantra of mambises and guerrilleros alike, furiously engaged in a fratricidal carnage that soon descended into depraved revenge cycles and an outrageous language of violence (159).  

The outcome was utterly underwhelming: a swift Pax Americana unable to satisfy either of the contending parties. In the last chapter, adroitly titled “Neither Victor nor Vanquished: Reckoning Deferred,” Pérez describes how U.S. interventionism rescued “a colonial system under siege” by forcing on Spain an imperial “transfer of sovereignty” (172). In spite of its proclamation, Cuban independence thus seemed more a thinly-masked neo-colonial settlement under American dominance than true political autonomy. It postponed, additionally, all the ultimate goals for which the revolutionary republic-in-arms had fought so much. Thirteen years of destructive “total war” (173) had brought about nothing but desolation, useless sacrifices, enduring hatred, insufficient accountability and the lingering “vestiges of colonialism” (185), not to mention antithetical collective memories and differing notions of the ideal “Cuban.”  

In vividly showcasing the repetitive postponement of Cuba’s “colonial reckoning,” Pérez’ book demonstrates the virtues of adopting a diachronic approach to the island’s 19th-century revolutionary projects and their fractured memory. It unpacks their multiple continuities and discontinuities, shedding light not only on what did happen but also on what could have happened: in other words, this is history as the expression of human freedom, not history as predetermined progress. Just as importantly, the book illuminates the enduring legacy of colonialism and the difficulties it entails for advancing successful nation-building projects —as much in Latin America as in the rest of the so-called “Global South,” as much in the 19th as in the 20th century, when Fidel Castro’s revolution vindicated, briefly and for some, the previously loathed word “guerrillero.”  

Alejandro Quintero Mächler is a Research Scholar and half-time Lecturer in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. He is the author of Perder la cabeza en el siglo XIX. Ensayos sobre historia de Colombia e Hispanoamérica (2023).