Chapter 3 explores the relationship between whiteness and the awareness of pretense. For some Cubans, racial mixing could be an effective means to eliminate blackness and the possibility of its communal or political articulation; for others, it would doom the nation. Racial passing and the pretense of acting as if races could be neatly demarcated endowed racism with the flexibility it required to preserve structures of inequality. When writers of African descent began to publish on the question in the 1880s, they often addressed this logic of pretense. Rodolfo de Lagardere, for example, deployed racial doubt in his 1889 booklet Blancos y negros to demonstrate that whiteness entailed a collective effort to forget the African origins of Cuban society. While some people of known African descent participated in whitening processes, others mobilized racial doubt to call attention to the amnesia and denial inherent to whiteness as an institution and set of lived practices.