While it was not until 1871 that slavery in Cuba was finally
abolished, African-descended people had high hopes for legal,
social, and economic advancement as the republican period started.
In
Black Political Activism and the Cuban Republic, Melina
Pappademos analyzes the racial politics and culture of black civic
and political activists during the Cuban Republic.
The path to equality, Pappademos reveals, was often stymied by
successive political and economic crises, patronage politics, and
profound racial tensions. In the face of these issues, black
political leaders and members of black social clubs developed
strategies for expanding their political authority and for winning
respectability and socioeconomic resources. Rather than appeal to a
monolithic black Cuban identity based on the assumption of shared
experience, these black activists, politicians, and public
intellectuals consistently recognized the class, cultural, and
ideological differences that existed within the black community,
thus challenging conventional wisdom about black community
formation and anachronistic ideas of racial solidarity. Pappademos
illuminates the central, yet often silenced, intellectual and
cultural role of black Cubans in the formation of the nation's
political structures; in doing so, she shows that black activism
was only partially motivated by race.