The Ignored Contender

The Ignored Contender: A Select Annotated Bibliography of the Cuban Autonomist Party (1878–1898) by Rafael Tarragó is a rare gem. Good old-fashioned annotated bibliographies are increasingly hard to find and yet remain among the most useful entry points into scholarly topics available today. Tarragó's guide to the history of the Cuban Autonomist Party is the form at its best. Covering over 300 primary and secondary sources, it is safe to say that the “ignored contender” is ignored no more. Bringing an important chapter of Cuban history out of the shadows with authority, Tarragó's volume, which contains the seeds of dozens and dozens of dissertation projects and book manuscripts, is a gift to scholars.In his introduction, Tarragó defends the need to draw scholarly attention to the history of the Cuban Autonomist Party, the “ignored contender” in the contest to define Cuba's political future. Shunted aside in the wake of the Spanish-American War by both the invading Americans and the Cuban insurgents, the party remained marginalized in Cubanist scholarship until relatively recently. Surely the fact that the history of the Cuban Autonomist Party and its work did not fit the revolutionary national narrative crafted after the Cuban Revolution of 1959 had something to do with it. In bringing the Cuban Autonomist Party to our collective attention, Tarragó helps us recontextualize the 30-year Hispano-Cuban conflict (1868–98) and late nineteenth-century Spanish and US colonial and imperial ambitions. The deeper study of the party, of its achievements and its failures, that Tarragó invites in this work stands to give us a much-needed, more nuanced understanding of Cuba's nineteenth-century political history.One of the greatest strengths of this work is the fact that Tarragó is himself a scholar of nineteenth-century Cuban history who has published a number of articles and book chapters on subjects ranging from the history of US-Hispanic relations to suffrage and cultures of violence in Cuba. Tarragó's deep knowledge of nineteenth-century history and his expertise are most notable when he renders visible, through his excavations of texts, chapters and sections of books that cover the Cuban Autonomist Party as only a secondary or tertiary subject. There are often no keywords in the titles that might clue the reader into the fact that the books he includes might be a resource for the topic.The first half of The Ignored Contender contains annotations on 121 published primary sources. Tarragó starts with official writings, communiqués, and publications by and about the party. A section of writings by contemporaries about the party follows. The last section features the writings of the party members themselves. What is most striking about these three sections is that they all contain sources about the Cuban Autonomist Party produced and published by Cubans in and outside Cuba (Madrid, León, New York, Washington, Bogotá, Paris, etc.). This is noteworthy because it reminds us not only that national political parties beyond the Cuban Revolutionary Party were internationally recognized and discussed but also that Cuban politics broadly was both transatlantic and inter-American. I would wager that if we looked harder, we would find discussion of the party everywhere that Cuban expatriates and exiles resided in the late nineteenth century.I could have stopped reading after the 121 primary sources discussed and been satisfied as a researcher familiar with this particular subject in Cuban history, but Tarragó also presents us with 182 secondary sources relating to the party. The annotations of these sources are equally thoughtful and illuminating. Also like the primary sources, these secondary sources rarely list the Cuban Autonomist Party as the titular subject. Tarragó invites us to sew together the strands of information found in the diverse texts and to build a new understanding of the party, its work, and its vision for Cuba.If there is one criticism I could level against this work, it would be that some of the annotations are more detailed and helpful than others. However, much more common are rich descriptions that inform the reader about not only the content of the text but its significance within a broader panorama of Cuban colonial politics in the nineteenth century.The Ignored Contender will be of interest to researchers and students at all levels working in Cuban politics as well as Spanish colonialism and US imperialism in the nineteenth century. Scholars interested in these subjects would be remiss if they did not use Tarragó's bibliography as a starting point

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