100 Books Like Runaway Slave Settlements in Cuba

I thoroughly enjoyed this exhaustive study of American runaways that uses a wide variety of often ignored archival material.

This great book details the reasons, the places, the profiles, the strategies, and the objectives of some of the tens of thousands of people who, each year, left the plantations behind. They included Free Blacks who had been kidnapped and managed to get away.

There is quasi nothing on Maroons but, to my delight, Franklin and Schweninger show that contrary to popular belief, most runaways did not attempt to go North but remained in the South, close to their families, or in nearby cities and towns, another county, or another state. 

I first became acquainted with the continental magnitude of marronage with the 1979 edition of this classic book. Richard Price, the expert on Maroon communities in Surinam, presents 21 texts on marronage in Spanish America, the French Caribbean, the United States, Brazil, Jamaica, Surinam, and French Guiana.

Sixteen pioneering historical studies were written by various scholars between the 1960s and 1970s. Five texts or testimonies by contemporaries, including Maroons themselves, were produced in the 18th and 19th centuries. Taken together, these studies and testimonies are essential to understanding the reach and significance of the maroon phenomenon in the history of Black people in the Americas.

By placing the American runaways’ experience in a continental perspective, this well-researched book brings a fresh outlook to the increasingly popular topic of runaways.

Besides the North and Canada, the contributors examine the motivations, lives, and networks of the people who looked for freedom in all directions. Taking their lives into their own hands, they found refuge in Southern cities, the Texas-Mexico borderlands, Mexico, which abolished slavery in 1829, Indian Country, and the Caribbean.

For each destination, the contributors study and evaluate the degree of freedom, formal, semiformal, and informal, which these self-liberated men and women were able to achieve.

This book is predominantly about Caribbean runaways and Maroons, with some brief forays into South America and the United States.

I found Thompson’s approach quite enlightening. Rather than studying marronage by country, as is usually the case, he chose an encompassing thematic approach across territories. He studies the topic in four major parts: the ideological bases of marronage, its origin and development, maroon organization, and the question of accommodation and revolution.

This panoramic view, which also offers a lot of details, helps point out commonalities but also differences between communities. 

Robert Whitney’s classic work on popular politics in Cuba from 1920 to 1940 is a must for the reader interested in the history of Cuba’s 1930s, especially Cuba’s “other revolution,” the Revolution of 1933. The book covers an absolutely crucial time in the island’s political evolution, and yet this time period is too often glossed over between interest in the Cuban Wars of Independence on the one hand and the Cuban Revolution of 1959 on the other. Whitney’s book, however, follows the politics of the island from the high corruption of 1920, through anti-dictatorial and anti-imperialist struggles, to the triumphant (if short-lived) arrival of constitutional democracy in 1940. An important scholar of Fulgencio Batista, Whitney traces the Cuban leader’s political twists and turns during the era, beginning with his critical role as a revolutionary in the 1933 uprising.

Drawing on vivid “coolie” testimonies and slave narratives, this book shows how Chinese contract laborers worked alongside African slaves in the final decades of slavery in the nineteenth century, forming cross-cultural ties and engaging in bitter rivalries as well as other experiences in between. The book features the voices of both sets of groups, including complicated commentary by slaves on the lot of so-called coolies. A powerful read, it brings to life the personal experiences of members of these groups of people during a brutal era of history.

I have read this book more than once and each time have found myself pulled into the life of the main character, a Chinese contract laborer, and his story, which spans several generations, set across the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The novel features an Afro-Chino Cuban family and shows how they become deeply part of Cuba. It also shows how the descendants of the mixed-race couple face trials in New York City and Vietnam, depicting complexities of race, gender, family, and heritage with beautiful, painful detail and emotion.

This novel is both sexy and chilling. It is the journey of a young woman, about her lovers, the intimacy of friendship, and her alluring social life in Havana, Cuba. With each page you sip the intensity of youth and political drama on the island. After traveling to Cuba to protest the US embargo in the 1990s and living for so many years in Miami with friends in the Cuban diaspora, Cuban's transnational socio-cultural complex frames how I think about islands. I relish how Portela writes, she is the friend who coaxes you out, keeps you up all night, with the promises of thrill, excitement, and a bit of danger. 

Alexander the Great’s project of uniting and reconciling religions and nations points to a theme in American history—the reconciliation of races and fellow Christians during the American Civil War. In a Black bookstore in Philadelphia, I found a book about this theme, Blake or the Huts of America, by Martin R. Delaney, the first Black to be made an Army officer.

It appeared in 1858, three years before the war. Delaney realized there would soon be a Civil War and explained how we could survive it. His strange recommendation: let a Black army put an end to slavery. That would cost much less than a national Federal army doing the same job. Men of God, not just generals, must lead these Black forces.

Delaney wanted a Black Alexander—but would have accepted a white one—a unifier as well as a conqueror. It’s the best of all American historical novels because Delaney… show more.

Samuel Farber grew up in Cuba and has been a prolific commentator on the island’s history and current events for decades. Although Revolution and Reaction is an older book, it is still a vital source for understanding Cuba’s Revolution of 1933 and its aftermath. Written less than two decades after the Cuban Revolution of 1959, Farber’s book begins from the premise that analysis of that revolution was oversimplified because observers lacked sophisticated, complex understanding of the island’s decades leading up to that event. In particular, he identifies the Revolution of 1933 as “a major turning point,” and sets out to “analyze the interplay of… structural conditions and historical processes and events” surrounding and following that conflagration. In addition to this overarching analysis, Farber offers discussions of various critically important organizations and constituencies of Cuba’s popular politics.