"A thought-provoking addition to the growing body of work challenging us to reconceptualize Afro-Cuban, and thereby Cuban, history, from the vantage point of the agency and consciousness of the enslaved, notionally freed, and free men and women of color; inciting us to dig deeper into the complexities and transnational scope of antislavery, anticolonial, and antiracist struggles in what was once one of the most technologically advanced plantation economies integrated into the global capitalist market; and, crucially, calling for present-day memorialization."--Jean Stubbs, professor of history, University of London, and codirector of the Commodities of Empire British Academy Research Project

"This book by a diverse group of seasoned and emerging scholars, represents a watershed intervention in the interpretation of 1812-1912, a particularly fraught period of Cuban history. In conceptually bridging a century of black militancy and contestatory political vision, and the bloody reprisals that secured white power in the slavery and postslavery era, Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation explodes the enduring myth of racial harmony in Cuba and provides an invaluable key to understanding race in the island's post-Soviet present."--Jerome C. Branche, editor of Post/Colonialism and the Pursuit of Freedom in the Black Atlantic