Race to Revolution: The U.S. and Cuba during Slavery and Jim Crow

In his pathbreaking 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

An important intellectual event … Hopefully, someone will discover over there, in the capital of the Empire, these works by Professor Horne. And may they find time to read them.

—Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada, former ambassador of Cuba to the United Nations and president of Cuba’s National Assembly

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