Changing Hisotry: Afro-Cuban Cabildos and Societies of Color in the Nineteenth Century.

Changing Hisotry: Afro-Cuban Cabildos and Societies of Color in the Nineteenth Century. By Philip A. Howard. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1998. xxii plus 227pp. $35.00).

This monograph is a welcome addition to nineteenth-century Cuban history, making an excellent connection between the two major award-winning monographs on Cuban history: Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860-1899 (1985); and Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886-1912 (1995). This book is also a valuable contribution to the recent emerging field of historical and anthropological studies on comparative slavery, emancipation, and race relations, and the African diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean; and African American history in a broad framework.

Howard maintains: "The struggles for freedom and equality of Africans and their descendants in nineteenth-century Cuba are the essential concerns of this study" (xiii). For this purpose, the author chose the topic of Afro-Cubans' unique mutual-aid associations which prevailed in the cities, such as the capital city of Havana, and located such Black associations at the center of his arguments. Unlike the case of two other major slave societies of the Americas, i.e. Brazil and the Antebellum South, Cuba did not become a slave society until the mid-eighteenth century. With the continuing massive influx of new arrivals from Africa, the proportion of African-born population in Cuba grew very quickly and the Cuban population became predominantly enslaved and foreign-born. Being forcefully transplanted in the New World as human commodities, these enslaved people of African birth formed their cabildos de naciones to adjust themselves culturally and psychologically.

The book has been divided into eight chapters. Chapter 1, discussing the formation of the colonial slave society during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, serves as a good foundation for the author' arguments on race, class, and identity in the following chapters. Chapter 2, based on the author's reading of abundant secondary literature, discusses the African roots of the cabildos de naciones and emphasizes their uniqueness by distinguishing them from the prevailing Catholic lay sodalities named cofradias. This chapter helps us understand fully ethnic diversity among the African-born slave population and historical processes by which ethnicity was recreated and ethnic solidarity was created as "Africanness" under New World slave systems. Chapter 3 examines the diverse roles and functions of Afro-Cuban cabildos as mutual-aid associations, which covered both their spiritual/religious and socioeconomic needs of their members. Chapters 4-8 elaborate several historical stages as the Afro-Cuban populat ion began to actively engage themselves in their own empowerment. Chapter 4 covers the initial awakening for political empowerment led by some prominent ethnic cabildo leaders. The subject of chapter 5 is Afro-Cubans' involvement in the independence movement, through their mutual-aid organizations, during the 1860s and 1870s. The last four chapters (5-8) reveal how, in the declining agro-export society, the Afro-Cuban population, recognizing their needs for emancipating and their right for political equality in Cuban society, reorganized and strengthened their mutual-aid associations by uniting themselves politically as Afro-Cubans. By discussing the Afro-Cuban mutual-aid associations in the nineteenth century and emphasizing Afro-Cubans as active participants in "changing history," Howard successfully demonstrates the creolization of ethnic identities as African into a collective racial identity as Afro-Cuban, although he does not present the issues of identity as his major focus in this book.

There are a few reservations to note. First, this book easily gives its readership the impression that only the urban Afro-Cuban population got involved in their political struggles for freedom. Were their social movements exclusively urban? The majority of persons of African descent in Cuba remained enslaved agricultural workers on the booming plantations in the countryside, and the author certainly mentions in the Introduction that planters encouraged them to form their own cabildos for the sake of slave control. Yet we cannot see the roles of the rural slave population in the Afro-Cuban political struggles; one may wonder how the urban population was connected with the rural population. Second, in relation to the first point, the author should have discussed the class stratification of the urban Afro-Cuban society and the intersections of race and class for Afro-Cubans' political empowerment since the Afro-Cuban cabildos were formed and participated in by urban artisanal blacks--the Black elite. Third, th is book does not refer to gender roles in such Afro-Cuban voluntary associations. To what degree did gender determine the Afro-Cuban individual's participation in such associations and their struggles for emancipation? Did women play equally crucial roles in such voluntary associations? And if so, did such roles change over time in relation to political and socioeconomic changes in the larger society? Helg, for instance, mentions in the introduction of her book the inevitable absence of women participants in Afro-Cubans' military struggles for freedom in the post-emancipation society.

Unfortunately also, the book neither provides new primary data nor new interpretations on the popular topic of Afro-Cuban cabildos, which have drawn much professional attention for their uniqueness. This book does not refer to, for instance, the historian Fannie Rushing's unpublished dissertation at the University of Chicago (1992), and the anthropologist Stephan Palmie's ongoing research. In addition, Howard's prose generally lacks rhetorical sophistication and elegance and his writing tends to get redundant at times. Yet, by discussing Afro-Cuban cabilodos together with other types of Afro-Cuban voluntary associations, such as sociedades de cor which virtually replaced the former at the mid-nineteenth century, rather than separating them from one another, the book successfully presents a good survey on Afro-Cubans' voluntary associations and their collective actions in rigorous pursuit of freedom and political equality in Cuban society. Changing History will be widely read by historians of Latin America, e specially of Cuba and the other former slave societies such as Brazil, and may well be adopted for college courses as a useful textbook in Latin American and African American history, as well as in comparative slavery and emancipation.