Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898. By Ada Ferret. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Pp. 273. $18.95.)

This author's account of the Cuban struggle for independence makes important contributions to two divergent historiographies. To U.S. historiographies of the Spanish-American war, which tilt analysis towards the final phase of North American intervention, Ada Ferrer adds the counterweight of Cuban actors struggling for 30 years over the nature of their relationship to the Spanish regime. At the same time, by noting the conflicts and tensions within the Cuban independence movement, she complicates Whiggish Cuban historiographic tendencies that assume unity and foreordained victory.

If both Cuban and U.S. historians tend to underplay the issue of internal tensions and divisions within the revolutionary movement, Ferrer places them at the center of her narrative. An early crisis and Spanish victory emerge from her account as the results...