Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898, winner of the Berkshire Book Prize for the best first book by a woman in any field of history, and Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution, which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University as well as multiple prizes from the American Historical Association. Born in Cuba and raised in the United States, she has been traveling to and conducting research on the island since 1990.
Ferrer applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Cuba: An American History, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Cuba: An American History drops the reader into Chapter 8 and one of Cuba’s most important conspiracies and rebellions against slavery. The story of that episode, from 1843 to 1844, counts on a remarkable cast of characters: a provocative Scottish abolitionist waging a battle against Cuban slave traders; a slaveholder who ran the island’s largest “slave-breeding” operation on one of the plantations where the conspiracy was allegedly uncovered; a prominent Cuban writer with liberal sympathies who happened to be the son-in-law of one of the wealthiest families on the island; American plantation owners, visitors, and diplomats who watched everything unfold from close proximity; a prolific poet named Plácido, the illegitimate son a Spanish ballerina and a Black barber; African women and men rising up on sugar plantations. Over a century later (as discussed in Chapter 31), Fidel Castro would name a Cuban military operation in Angola after one of them: the rebel leader Carlota Lucumí. Like most conspiracies and rebellions of its kind, the 1843-1844 one was crushed by the state. Scholars estimate that some three thousand people died—in the fighting or later from diseases incurred in jail, by suicide on the part of those who feared getting caught, and, unsurprisingly, by execution and torture. It was the torture inflicted by the government on suspects that ended up giving this historical episode its name: La Escalera, or the Ladder, because people were tied to ladders and whipped.Follow Ada Ferrer on Twitter.
The conspiracy that is the subject of page 99 is just one tiny part of a book that chronicles more than five hundred years of the island’s history. Yet landing on that page does cast light on some of the most important elements of the book. In telling the history of Cuba, I have approached it from both within and without. I pay particular attention to external forces that have shaped the island’s past and present. The United States plays a prominent role in that regard. At the same time, I have written the history of Cuba in ways that stress the experiences of ordinary men and women. As I write in the prologue, “in this history of Cuba, kings and presidents, revolutionaries and dictators share space with many others . . . . whether those taking up arms in a revolution or sewing to the light of glowworms in a slave hut or building a raft to take to sea.” By opening to page 99, readers may sense some of that, of the ways many different kinds of people act on history, and have history act on them. I just wish that page 99 was one with a little less on the Scottish abolitionist and more, say, on Plácido (97-98) or Carlota (102).
--Marshal Zeringue
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