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Mambisas. Rebel Women in Nineteenth Century Cuba. Teresa Prados-Torreira. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2005. xii and 186 pp., photos, notes, bibliography, and index. $59.95 Cloth (ISBN 0-8130-2852-3).
It may not be entirely surprising for many readers to discover that the war cry Cuba Libre had a different significance for men than it did for women during the Cuban struggles for independence of the nineteenth century. Yet, surprisingly little attention has been paid to examining the role of women in the process of nation-building in Cuba. In her engaging book, Teresa Prados-Torreira focuses upon the mambisas (the feminine form of the term mambises used by the Spanish to refer to the insurgent forces in Cuba) to explore an important aspect of the revolutionary period. Gender did indeed matter in the struggling colony's attempts to define what a free and independent Cuba should look like. And women were instrumental in that process, helping the island to develop both a sense of nationhood and to carve out the notion of cubanidad.
Beginning with the 18th century, Prados-Torreira examines the contradictions inherent in the multiple roles women played in the revolutionary movement. Women were used to promote the war cause even as historical circumstances required those same women to step outside of the social strictures of their day to shape the very terms of the conflict (p. 3). The author relies wherever possible on first-hand accounts and uses all forms of cultural artifacts including original letters, poems, and materials from Cuban archives (some in rather rough translations from the Spanish), to explore how...