‘Political changüí’: race, political culture, and black civic activism in the early Cuban republic

Abstract

This article examines race and the structure of republican Cuban politics after Spanish colonialism ended in 1898. It discusses the structural role of patronage and political sociability in the transition from colony to republic, alongside ideas circulating about political modernity, democracy, and civil society. The article places special emphasis on black civic activism and uses race as its central lens to understand the political forces unleashed by the formal collapse of monarchial rule as well as the limits of republican democracy due to competing interests, racialist ideas, and foreign domination. These factors set the stage for ongoing republican political crises and were influential in the tenor of Cuban political culture through the 1959 Revolution.