Born in 1880, Ricardo Batrell Oviedo worked on a sugar estate in Matanzas province before joining Cuba's final independence war from Spain at age 15. After the war ended in 1898, Batrell learned to read and write and published in 1912 a memoir of his time as a soldier. It remains a rare autobiographical account by an Afro-descendant Cuban in a liberation army comprised largely of men of color. This first English translation introduces Batrell's careful reflections to scholars and students interested in military history, the social foundations of Cuban nationalism, and the experience of race during and after the independence war.

Readers hoping for a sustained classroom-ready reflection on racial identity will find that military experiences occupy far more of Batrell's attention. But Batrell makes clear that in his skirmishes against Spanish forces, his encounters with displaced and war-torn civilians, and his postwar frustrations with US intervention and the Cuban Republic, blackness was inseparable from the experience of soldiering. The introduction by literary scholar and translator Mark Sanders offers an overview of colonialism, slavery, independence, and early nationhood in Cuba, focusing on the promises and limitations of a national identity premised on the negation of racial difference. It also locates Batrell's narrative in the context of other Cuban war memoirs, many of which minimize mentions of race, and of Black autobiography in the Atlantic world. An appendix describes Sanders's consultation of a small collection of Batrell's papers at the Archivo Nacional de Cuba; translated quotations from handwritten letters invite comparisons to the published text.