Lealtades insurrectas: mujeres afrocubanas y guerra colonial en la Primera República española, 1873-1874

The First Spanish Republic (1873-1874) took place during the Ten Years' War in Cuba (1868-1878). This paper examines through military and colonial sources how Afro-Cuban women participated in the insurgery and contributed to their strengthening during the First Spanish Republic. Gender, and a common experience of enslavement and resistance practices, played a key role in insurgent tactics such as mass desertetions from Spanish military camps. Republicanism in the Spanish metropole advocated for the abolition of slavery and political and civil rights for free Afro-descendants but did not implement their reformist policies in Cuba. Afro-Cuban women participating in the insurgent communities, which were based on kinship relations, experienced republican colonialism as an extension of the slave system and racism. By focusing on gender and race in the context of the colonial war and republican policies, it is possible to observe a more complex dimension of the colonial relationship and the revolutionary (anti)colonial processes during the First Spanish Republic.