This important and revealing book studies the economic roots of Cuban nationalism during the interwar period, between the end of the Ten Years’ War (1878) and the new war of national liberation in 1895. Fernández argues that Spanish economic and fiscal policies during this period alienated large sectors of Cuban society, thus fueling anticolonial sentiments. These policies created economic and monetary uncertainty, “threatened land security, limited diversification or industrialization, and ensured unemployment and underemployment” (p. 3). In other words, these policies contributed significantly to what twentieth-century observers would later describe as Cuba’s underdevelopment. A second and related argument is that “this was the period in which the fate of the Cuban economy and its relationship with the United States was sealed” (p. 3).
These arguments challenge the current narrative of Cuban nation making in several ways. Although historians have long recognized that economic frustration added to resentment against Spanish colonialism,...
