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A Black Soldier’s Story: The Narrative of Ricardo Batrell and the Cuban War of Independence

Amazon.com Price:  $5.70 (as of 05/05/2019 23:00 PST- Details)

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Description

In 1896, an illiterate, fifteen-year-old Afro-Cuban field hand joined the insurrection army fighting for Cuba’s independence. Though poor and uneducated, Ricardo Batrell believed within the promise of Cuba Libre, the vision of a democratic and egalitarian nation that inspired the Cuban War of Independence. After the war ended in 1898, Batrell taught himself to read and write and published a memoir of his wartime experiences, Para la Historia. At first published in 1912-the similar year by which the Cuban government massacred more than 5,000 Afro-Cubans-this work of both protest and patriotism is the one autobiographical account of the war written by an Afro-Cuban soldier.

After the war, Batrell became dismayed by the Cuban Republic’s rapid retreat from the revolution’s democratic ideals. Government corruption, racial discrimination, and the systematic exclusion of black veterans from public service had helped to reassert the racial hierarchy of colonial Cuba. With his memoir, Batrell hoped to remind Cubans about the participation of Afro-Cubans within the war (up to 80 percent of the Cuban Liberation Army may have been Afro-Cuban) and to protest their subjugation in its aftermath.

Now to be had for the first time in English, Batrell’s powerful memoir provides profound insights into the role of race within the nation’s history. Deftly rendering Batrell’s forceful and full of life prose into English, Mark A. Sanders also puts forth a critical introduction that contextualizes Batrell’s standpoint within Cuba’s colonial history and its racial politics.

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