This collection of research from Cuba scholars explores key conflicts, episodes, currents, and tensions that helped shape Cuba as a modern, independent nation. Cuba in the nineteenth century was characterized by social struggle. Slavery, Spanish colonial rule, and racial tension permeated every corner of Cuban life—from urban dwelling to house of charity, from sugarcane field to tobacco vega, from seaport to railway—and furnished a lively spectacle for the privileged foreigner gazing upon Cuba from afar. Chapters discuss topics including slavery, gendered forced labor, indentured labor, agricultural economics, industrial development, newspaper and print culture, and the origins of the "Cuba Threat." The volume links key aspects of Cuba’s history, such as social conflict and economic underdevelopment, to present a detailed analysis of Cuban civil society in the 1800s. Social Struggle and Civil Society in Nineteenth Century Cuba appeals to general readers and scholars in a range of disciplines, including history, women’s studies, economics, architectural preservation, media studies, and literature.

Louis A. Perez Jr.'s new history of nineteenth-century Cuba chronicles in fascinating detail the emergence of an urban middle class that was imbued with new knowledge and moral systems. Fostering innovative skills and technologies, these Cubans became deeply implicated in an expanding market culture during the boom in sugar production and prior to independence. Contributing to the cultural history of capitalism in Latin America, Perez argues that such creoles were cosmopolitans with powerful transnational affinities and an abiding identification with modernity. This period of Cuban history is usually viewed through a political lens, but Perez, here emphasizing the character of everyday life within the increasingly fraught colonial system, shows how moral, social, and cultural change that resulted from market forces also contributed to conditions leading to the collapse of the Spanish colonial administration. Perez highlights women's centrality in this process, showing how criollas adapted to new modes of self-representation as a means of self-fulfillment. Increasing opportunities for middle-class women's public presence and social participation was both cause and consequence of expanding consumerism and of women's challenges to prevailing gender hierarchies. Seemingly simple actions--riding a bicycle, for example, or deploying the abanico, the fan, in different ways--exposed how traditional systems of power and privilege clashed with norms of modernity and progress.

A study of marriage patterns in 19th-century Cuba

Among the factors inhibiting development of diversified economic structures in many Caribbean and Latin American countries, the persistence of monoculture plays a crucial role. Examining Cuba as a case study, Laird Bergad uses extensive data from Cuban archival sources to analyze the social and economic structures of a country shaped by monocultural sugar production since the mid-eighteenth century. He focuses on Matanzas, the center of the Cuban slave-based sugar economy, and shows how dependence on this one product generated great wealth but ultimately produced an unstable society in which most people remained poor and illiterate. A provocative account of nineteenth-century Cuban rural society emerges from the collective portrait of the social sectors that forged the history of Matanzas's sugar production. Bergad depicts the interaction among planters, merchants, slave traders, slaves, and free blacks while showing how sugar monoculture adapted to social and economic changes. He presents a detailed study of the economics of slave labor and new data that challenges prior interpretations of Cuban slavery.

Investigates how patriarchy operated in the lives of the women of Cuba, from elite women to slaves Scholars have long recognized the importance of gender and hierarchy in the slave societies of the New World, yet gendered analysis of Cuba has lagged behind study of other regions. Cuban elites recognized that creating and maintaining the Cuban slave society required a rigid social hierarchy based on race, gender, and legal status. Given the dramatic changes that came to Cuba in the wake of the Haitian Revolution and the growth of the enslaved population, the maintenance of order required a patriarchy that placed both women and slaves among the lower ranks. Based on a variety of archival and printed primary sources, this book examines how patriarchy functioned outside the confines of the family unit by scrutinizing the foundation on which nineteenth-century Cuban patriarchy rested. This book investigates how patriarchy operated in the lives of the women of Cuba, from elite women to slaves. Through chapters on motherhood, marriage, education, public charity, and the sale of slaves, insight is gained into the role of patriarchy both as a guiding ideology and lived history in the Caribbean's longest lasting slave society. Sarah L. Franklin is assistant professor of history at the University of North Alabama.

In the late nineteenth century, in an age of ascendant racism and imperial expansion, there emerged in Cuba a movement that unified black, mulatto, and white men in an attack on Europe's oldest empire, with the goal of creating a nation explicitly defined