Throughout the nineteenth century, official records and foreign visitors very often characterized Cuba as the “Ever-Faithful Island.” David Sartorius asserts that this allegiance could not have succeeded without the affirmation of Cubans of African descent. Eschewing depictions of Cubans of color as either “truly rebellious or truly loyal,” he demonstrates how they used the rhetoric of loyalty and subordination as a strategy for political inclusion (p. 54). He draws on a variety of archival sources in Cuba, Spain, and the United States, including organizational proceedings, periodicals, military units, and the records of political parties, to address the underexplored theme of colonialism and black fidelity. In doing so, Sartorius crafts a revisionist history that challenges established divisions separating Cuba's ideologies of race in the colonial and national periods. The efforts of black Cubans to be incorporated, albeit unequally, into colonial politics reveals the centrality of race and loyalty to the preservation of Spanish colonial rule in Cuba.

Sartorius examines how Cubans of color used military service and public spaces, especially political organizations, the press, and associations, to engage the category of colonial subject. Interrogations of black soldiers during the Ten Years’ War shed light on the motivations of enslaved Cubans for aligning with the imperial power. Former bondsmen in the Spanish army gained their freedom for “having actively sought out Spanish troops and offering their services,” which included performing menial labor, providing intelligence on insurgent movements, leaving rebel owners, and switching sides (p. 118). Sartorius also offers a rare glimpse into how enslaved women made use of military participation, as nurses, cooks, and laundresses to secure a path to liberty. Given that insurgents of color also performed similar activities, Sartorius contends that loyalty could not be predicted based on race, nor could it be considered a position of passivity.

Following the Ten Years’ War, associations throughout Cuba gathered tentatively, under surveillance for potential anticolonial behavior. People of color paid a heavy cultural price as authorities actively persecuted societies that celebrated African-derived customs. By the 1890s, even though public spaces fostered broader openings for nationalists to advocate for independence, the roles for Cubans of color remained limited. Under these constraints, they “worked from the scripts of loyal subjectivity” to achieve respectability, while also publicly addressing the discrimination that contravened their Spanish civil rights (p. 156).

The end of slavery produced new relationships among Cubans of color to political and civil arenas. For instance, during a gathering at the Teatro Zorilla in Cienfuegos to mark emancipation, attendees rejected liberal politicians’ claims and heralded Spain as the source of abolition. Broader civic expressions emerged at the theater of the Centro La Amistad, a society of color, when it supported a charitable performance to benefit the victims of the cholera epidemic in Spain. Using these and similar examples, Sartorius emphasizes the ways Cubans of color used public spaces to demand “membership in a larger colonial political community” and to map their future partisan alliances in post-emancipation society (p. 172).

Although the varied expressions of allegiance and subjectivity did not make the end of Spanish rule inevitable, the multiple spaces for political membership worked to decenter colonial fidelity. Sartorius's final chapter introduces integrity as an inextricable third category in the destabilization of loyalty. This concept, however, merits greater elaboration in terms of its ideological development and significance to Cuba's colonial and national projects. Meanwhile, Spain's discriminatory practices incited protests from associations, and Cubans of African descent swelled the insurgent ranks in the War for Independence. Officials reluctantly recognized that black Cubans had multiple loyalties—to families, communities, democratic principles, and national sovereignty—that undermined colonial allegiance.

Sartorius succeeds in revealing the largely hidden story of the various and simultaneous expressions of loyalty and subjectivity by Cubans of African descent during nineteenth-century struggles over colonialism, abolition, and independence. An assessment of the debates within the black community would have further enriched his discussion of the complexities of loyalty at the end of the Spanish Empire. Overall, this persuasive account expands the scholarship on Cuban nationalism and provides insights into the parallel narrative of colonial allegiance. It also offers an important model for future studies on race and loyalty in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the broader Atlantic World.