The introduction gives a panoramic overview of long-standing and prevailing historiographical perspectives on the character and content of the nineteenth-century wars for independence in Cuba, setting in relief the conventions of the existing scholarship as a way to distinguish the departure of the arguments advanced on the pages that follow. The introduction is designed to acknowledge respectfully a scholarship spanning several generations and at the same time to argue that the process of national liberation was far more complicated and possessed a far greater number of contingencies than has been acknowledged.