Los Expulsados a Fernando Poo. A Global Microhistory of Cuban Emancipation Struggles, 1860-1900

• Applicant: Dr. Agustina Carrizo de Reimann
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 538125275

Cuba is an exceptional case in Latin American history due to its comparatively late independence and the importance of its diaspora in the emancipation process. The research project integrates the reflections developed by studies on the productive aspects of forced displacement, the role of Afro-Latin Americans in national independence, and Spanish colonialism in Africa to explore a little-known itinerary of the Cuban diaspora: the deportations of "white" separatists and Afro-Cuban communities to Fernando Poo between 1860-1900. The project starts from the premise that the forced displacement to Fernando Poo led to a resignification of racial belonging and inequality within Cuban deportee communities. Through the reincorporation of deportees into the Cuban diaspora, intercolonial resignifications entered and shaped debates that framed Cuban independence. To shed new light on the interplay between radical emancipatory visions and the colonial structures of domination upon which Latin American nations were founded, the research project will address the following questions: What do Cuban stories of deportation to the Central African colonial enclave contribute to our understanding of Cuba's intertwined struggles against colonialism and racism? Where did the experiences of Cuban "white" insurgents overlap with those of freed Afro-Cubans? Where did they diverge? What exactly made Cuban deportees "out of place"? How did intercolonial displacement shape their understandings of domination and emancipation? The research will follow Cuban transmigrations across the Atlantic, the Gulf of Guinea and the Gulf of Mexico, with a particular focus on the Cuban diaspora in the city of Veracruz, a central destination for Cuban separatists during the period under consideration. To this end, it will compile and analyse a heterogeneous corpus, including deportees' memoirs, the colonial bureaucracy and the debates on colonial rule and national emancipation that circulated in the Spanish, Cuban and Afro-Cuban press. In doing so, it will elaborate a global microhistory of Cuban emancipation "across the South" that aims to integrate long-excluded actors and sites of national independence and to decentre global histories of political transformation in nineteenth-century Latin America.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants