From the time Europeans first penetrated the region, the economic, political, and social life of the Caribbean has been profoundly influenced by external forces and powers. Luis Martínez-Fernández explores what he terms the “dual nationalism” that the Spanish colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic experienced during the critical period between the outbreak of La Escalera in the 1840s and the end of the Ten Years’ War in 1878.

While most historians generally agree that U.S. influence in the Caribbean became evident at the end of the nineteenth century, the author locates this influence as early as the 1850s. A tacit agreement permitted Spain to retain its Caribbean possessions while the United States enhanced its commercial domination of these colonies. This mounting U.S. presence came at a time when British influence was on the wane as a result of a series of slave conspiracies in the 1840s. As U.S. policymakers actively promoted plans to buy Cuba from Spain, some Southern elements sought to destabilize the Hispanic Caribbean through well-funded military excursions that initially obtained tacit approval from important segments of the local Creole population.

This mounting process of “Spanish colonialism and U.S. neocolonialism” (p. 58) in the region became increasingly evident through heavy U.S. capital investment in various sectors of the expanding Cuban sugar and railroad industries. Puerto Rico, however, differed somewhat from Cuba in that it avoided the emergence of the massive and intensive sugar monoculture that the latter experienced. With less money being invested in long-range capital projects, Puerto Rico was also less dependent on slave labor. Accordingly, it pursued a path in which coffee and sugar cultivation flourished side by side.

The author traverses well-worn turf in asserting that the politically conservative Cuban creoles’ demands for annexation to the United States stemmed from their fear that Spain would accede to British demands for abolishing slavery. He charts new ground, however, by providing a nuanced treatment of the strong antiannexation sentiments and forces that actively sought to maintain ties to Spain and eliminate non-Catholic U.S. influences. Spain used the opportunity afforded by the United States Civil War to reassert its control over its Caribbean empire, where powerful slave holders regarded loyalty to Spain as the surest way of maintaining slavery. The postwar years ushered in a changed U.S. policy toward the region when mounting abolitionism spelled the doom of slavery in the Hispanic Caribbean. Thereafter, republican separatist sentiment and movement increased in both Cuba and Puerto Rico in the face of growing U.S. commitment to enhance its interests and commercial empire.

Whether by design or by accident, the Dominican Republic appears to be an afterthought throughout the author’s discourse, hardly receiving treatment on the level that he devotes to either Cuba or Puerto Rico. However, this useful and thought-provoking book provides an interesting comparative framework through which to view the island societies of the Hispanic Caribbean at an important juncture in their histories.