A Black Soldiers Story: The Narrative of Ricardo Batrell and the Cuban War of Independence

(Paperback)

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In 1896, an illiterate, fifteen-year-old Afro-Cuban field hand joined the rebel army fighting for Cuba's independence. Though poor and uneducated, Ricardo Batrell believed in 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. Originally published in 1912the same year in which the Cuban government massacred more than 5,000 Afro-Cubansthis work of both protest and patriotism is the only autobiographical account of the war written by an Afro-Cuban soldier.

Reviews

"Black soldiers played a crucialalso inadequately appreciatedrole in winning Latin American independence, and nowhere more so than in Cuba. Many thanks to Mark A. Sanders for giving Ricardo Batrells rare and remarkable testimony a vigorous, well-contextualized, and carefully-annotated voice in English." John Charles Chasteen, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

"In an anticolonial army that was primarily black, Ricardo Batrell was one of only two black soldiers to write his own memoir of Cubas final War of Independence, the riveting story of his experience as a black soldier in a war that mobilized thousands of black men and that profoundly challenged racial hierarchies and assumptions. It is also a moving account of Batrells sense of betrayal as the promise of that movement gave way to U.S. intervention. An unusual and wonderfully rich source, available now more widely thanks to Mark Sanderss lively and most welcome translation." Ada Ferrer, NYU

Author Bio

Mark A. Sanders is associate professor of African-American studies and English at Emory University. His books include Afro-Modernist Aesthetics and the Poetry of Sterling A. Brown.