This volume resembles the famed Cuban stew—ajíaco—a combination of somewhat dissimilar ingredients whose blending together enhances each of the elements. Drawing on his many years of research on the Catholic Church in Cuba, as well as related topics, the author offers six essays examining five centuries of the history of the church in Cuba, the positions of clerics on slavery from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, an analysis of Nicolás Guillén’s poem West Indies, Ltd., a conflict over the hierarchical authority of the Catholic Church and a progressive cleric in nineteenth-century New York that intrigued José Martí, the relationship of the Catholic Church and the independence leader Máximo Gómez, and finally the diplomatic role of Father Desiderio Mesnier in the independence movement.
Maza links together these topics by arguing that the perception of the role of the Catholic Church in Cuba as a monolithic bulwark of...
