ABOUT THIS BOOK

In Colonial Reckoning Louis A. Pérez Jr. examines Cuba’s wars for independence in the second half of the nineteenth century, focusing specifically on those Cubans who remained loyal to Spain. Drawing on newspaper articles, personal letters, military battle reports, government commissions, consular reports, literature, and other materials, Pérez shows how everyday black, white, and creole Cubans defended the Spanish empire as paramilitary guerrillas alongside white elites. These loyalist Cubans helped the Spanish fight a separatist insurgency composed of a similarly diverse population of Cubans. Pérez demonstrates that these wars were so deadly and drawn out precisely because Cubans fought on both sides, each holding myriad competing visions of sovereignty and contested meanings of nation. Complicating mythical and historiographical narratives that Cuban national liberation was a struggle waged between Cubans of color and white elites beholden to Spain, Pérez shows that the fight consisted of a great number of factions with unique and evolving motivations. In so doing, he interrogates anew the multifaceted social dimensions and multiple political aspects of the complex drama of Cuban national formation.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Louis A. Pérez Jr. is J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of numerous books, most recently, Rice in the Time of Sugar: The Political Economy of Food in Cuba.

REVIEWS

“A work of deep reflection and wide research, Colonial Reckoning proposes a new framework for understanding the nineteenth-century Cuban wars for independence. Louis A. Pérez Jr. demonstrates that these were in many ways civil wars, during which Spain recruited tens of thousands of Cubans to fight against the insurrection and for the maintenance of Spanish sovereignty. Pérez argues that there emerged after independence a fractured nationality in which a seemingly disloyal portion of the population was figuratively written out of membership in the nation. That habit of mind, he suggests, at times emerges in different forms in Cuba today.”

-- Rebecca J. Scott, author of Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery

“Louis A. Pérez Jr. accomplishes what few authors do when covering such well-known topics as Cuban independence: he takes a story we know well and not only provides a new interpretation depth of analysis but reframes it to show that independence was as much a civil war to the death between Cubans as it was a call for Cuba Libre.”

-- Matt D. Childs, author of The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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