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A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba New Edition
Author(s): Alejandro de la Fuente (Author)
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication Date: 30 April 2001
- Edition: New
- Language: English
- Print length: 464 pages
- ISBN-10: 9780807826089
- ISBN-13: 0807826081
Book Description
After 30 years of anticolonial struggle against Spain and four years of military occupation by the United States, Cuba formally became an independant 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 postrevolutionary 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 antiracism coexisted within Cuban Nationalism and in turn, Cuban society. This coexistence has persisted to this day, despite significant efforts by the revolutionary government to improve the lot of the poor and build a nation truly for all.
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Alejandro de la Fuente is assistant professor of Latin American history at the University of Pittsburgh.
