This book is an ambitious study of race and racial equality in Cuba during its twentieth-century process of national formation. It examines the impact of racial ideologies, government policies, and social and political mobilization in shaping Afro-Cubans’ opportunities and limitations in the labor market, education, and political representation during the republican and revolutionary periods.
The book is organized chronologically, beginning with an analysis of race in the competing visions of national construction and electoral politics from the inauguration of the republic in 1902 to Gerardo Machado’s dictatorship. The second part focuses on the labor market and education as key areas of inequality from the 1900s to the 1950s. The author then turns to the complex politics of the three decades that preceded the revolution of 1959, in which race continued to be central in the struggle of unions and political parties as well as in the failed revolution of 1933,...
