Friday, June 20, 2014 – 5 PM
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Race to Revolution
The U.S. and Cuba during Slavery and Jim Crow
by Gerald Horne
“Path-breaking … Their story is our story, and thanks to Horne, we can now study its flow in a single, and profound, narrative.”
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
429 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-1-58367-445-1
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-58367-446-8
June 2014
http://monthlyreview.org/press/books/pb4451/
The histories of Cuba and the United States are tightly intertwined and have been for at least two centuries. In Race to Revolution, historian Gerald Horne examines a critical relationship between the two countries by tracing out the typically overlooked interconnections among slavery, Jim Crow, and revolution. Slavery was central to the economic and political trajectories of Cuba and the United States, both in terms of each nation’s internal political and economic development and in the interactions between the small Caribbean island and the Colossus of the North.
Horne draws a direct link between the black experiences in two very different countries and follows that connection through changing periods of resistance and revolutionary upheaval. Black Cubans were crucial to Cuba’s initial independence, and the relative freedom they achieved helped bring down Jim Crow in the United States, reinforcing radical politics within the black communities of both nations. This in turn helped to create the conditions that gave rise to the Cuban Revolution which, on New Years’ Day in 1959, shook the United States to its core.
Based on extensive research in Havana, Madrid, London, and throughout the U.S., Race to Revolution delves deep into the historical record, bringing to life the experiences of slaves and slave traders, abolitionists and sailors, politicians and poor farmers. It illuminates the complex web of interaction and influence that shaped the lives of many generations as they struggled over questions of race, property, and political power in both Cuba and the United States.
In his path-breaking book, Gerald Horne reveals how the histories of Cuba and the United States, from the slave trade to Jim Crow and the Cold War, have always been closer and more turbulent than the ninety miles separating them across the Straits of Florida. Indeed, one cannot possibly understand the journey from bondage to freedom in America without wrestling with its consequences for the people of African descent in Cuba. Their story is our story, and thanks to Horne, we can now study its flow in a single, and profound, narrative.
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University
Gerald Horne is one of our most original historians.
—Ishmael Reed, John D. MacArthur Fellow
Gerald Horne’s epic history will help many readers understand the special relationship between slavery, African Americans, and Cuba over the centuries. Horne continues in the deep tradition of Frederick Douglass, who described Cuba as ‘the great western slave mart of the world.’ Horne is in the forefront of historians laboring to revise the entire story of the Americas until the broken pieces are mended.
—Tom Hayden, author, Inspiring Participatory Democracy
Horne offers new insights and thoughtful analysis of the comparative and at time complementary circumstances of slavery and racial animus in Cuba and the United States, and in the process reveals a new dimension to the complexities of the Cuba-U.S. problematic. Race to Revolution is a very much welcome and important contribution to the scholarship on the workings of trans-national systems.
—Louis A. Pérez, Jr., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Gerald Horne is John and Rebecca Moores Professor of African-American History at the University of Houston. He is the author of more than two dozen books, including The Counter-Revolution of 1776, Negro Comrades of the Crown, Mau Mau in Harlem?, From the Barrel of a Gun, and Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-1950.
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http://monthlyreview.org/press/books/pb4451/
Date: Jun 8, 2014 10:35 AM
The Counter-Revolution of 1776:
Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America
(Hardcover)
By Gerald Horne
$48.75
The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America
Description
________________________________________
The successful 1776 revolt against British rule in North America has been hailed almost universally as a great step forward for humanity. But the Africans then residing in the colonies overwhelmingly sided with London.
In this trailblazing book, Gerald Horne complements his earlier celebrated Negro Comrades of the Crown, by showing that in the prelude to 1776, the abolition of slavery seemed all but inevitable in London, delighting Africans as much as it outraged slaveholders, and sparking the colonial revolt.
In the prelude to 1776, more and more Africans were joining the British military, and anti-slavery sentiments were deepening throughout Britain. And in the Caribbean, rebellious Africans were chasing Europeans to the mainland. Unlike their counterparts in London, the European colonists overwhelmingly associated enslaved Africans with subversion and hostility to the status quo.
For European colonists, the major threat to security in North America was a foreign invasion combined with an insurrection of the enslaved. And as 1776 approached, London-imposed abolition throughout the colonies was a very real and threatening possibility–a possibility the founding fathers feared could bring the slave rebellions of Jamaica and Antigua to the thirteen colonies. To forestall it, they went to war.
The so-called Revolutionary War, Horne writes, was in large part a counter-revolution, a conservative movement that the founding fathers fought in order to preserve their liberty to enslave others–and which today takes the form of a racialized conservatism and a persistent racism targeting the descendants of the enslaved. The Counter-Revolution of 1776 drives us to a radical new understanding of the traditional heroic creation myth of the United States.
The perceived importance of Cuba to the security of the mainland did not arise initially in 1959 and thereafter. Before 1776 Spanish Cuba was the launching pad for repeated attacks on Georgia and the Carolinas, frequently with African troops at the tip of the spear, which terrified settlers. This led directly to the so-called Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), which–inter alia–was designed to eradicate this threat by ousting the Spanish from Florida and Cuba.
By 1762, this goal had been attained though through negotiations Madrid was able to retain Cuba (while Britain occupied Florida). With the threat from Cuba dissipated, the mainland settlers then focused intently on ousting London–a goal that accelerated in importance when in 1772 the British Empire seemed to be moving toward abolition of slavery, which would have jeopardized the fortunes of leading settlers, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and attorneys for slaveholders, e.g. John Adams.
The successful revolt against British rule leading to the formation of the USA–a process aided immeasurably by Madrid–then led to the new republic ousting Britain from leadership of the African Slave Trade: thus, as early as the 1790s and continuing until 1865, U.S. nationals were in the leadership of bringing enslaved Africans to Cuba–a period when the slave population of the island increased exponentially.
Unfortunately, many among the U.S. left still cling to the fairy tale that the formation of the U.S., which led to the first apartheid state was a great leap forward for humanity–though demonstrably this was hardly the case for those who happened to be of African descent (which may shed light on why this left’s record in recruiting of the most stalwart progressive force in the U.S., i.e. African-Americans, has been far below par).
Product DetailsISBN-10: 1479893404
ISBN-13: 9781479893409
Published: New York University Press
Pages: 363
Language: English
Usually Ships in 1-5 days
• Hardcover (3/2014): $48.75
