Black Freedom and Education in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

Examining the educational legacy of Afro-Cuban teachers and activists

In this book, Raquel Otheguy argues that Afro-descended teachers and activists were central to the development of a national education system in Cuba. Tracing the emergence of a Black Cuban educational tradition whose hallmarks were at the forefront of transatlantic educational currents, Otheguy examines how this movement pushed the island’s public school system to be more accessible to children and adults of all races, genders, and classes.

Otheguy describes Afro-Cuban education before public schools were officially desegregated in 1894, from the maestras amigas—Black and mulata women who taught in their homes—to teachers in the schools of mutual-aid societies for people of color. In the ways that Afro-descendants interacted with the Spanish colonial school system and its authorities, and in the separate schools they created, they were resisting the hardening racial boundaries that characterized Cuban life and developing alternative visions of possible societies, nations, and futures. Otheguy demonstrates that Black Cubans pioneered the region’s most progressive innovations in education and influenced the trajectory of public school systems in their nation and the broader Americas.

Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities