The Provincial Archive as a Place of Memory: Confronting Oral and Written Sources on the Role of Former Slaves in the Cuban War of Independence (1895-98)

Authors

Rebecca J. Scott, University of Michigan Law SchoolFollow

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

2006

Abstract

Few questions of historical interpretation are more passionately debated than those that have become intertwined with a national narrative and with the definition of how a country came to be what it is imagined to be. For the island nation of Cuba, political independence was forged in a lengthy series of wars against Spanish colonial rule, ending in a direct encounter with U.S. expansionism. Those wars began in 1868 and concluded in 1898 with the departure of Spanish troops, followed by a military occupation of the island by U.S. forces. In 1902 the arst Cuban republic emerged, but it was bound by the infamous Platt Amendment, which guaranteed to the United States a right of renewed intervention. The wars themselves were thus both a triumph and a defeat, a touchstone for national pride, and—in the outcome—a source of nationalist disappointment.

Publication Information & Recommended Citation

Scott, Rebecca J. "The Provincial Archive as a Place of Memory: Confronting Oral and Written Sources on the Role of Former Slaves in the Cuban War of Independence (1895-98)." In Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar, edited by Francis X. Blouin and William G. Rosenberg, 280-90. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. (Originally published under the same title in New W. Indian Guide 76, no. 3/4 (2002): 191-210.)