Suspect freedoms : the racial and sexual politics of Cubanidad in New York 1823 1957 Beginning in the early nineteenth century Cubans migrated to New York City to organize and protest against Spanish colonial rule. While revolutionary wars raged in Cuba expatriates envisioned dissected and redefined meanings of independence and nationhood. An underlying element was the concept of Cubanidad a shared sense of what it meant to be Cuban. Deeply influenced by discussions of slavery freedom masculinity and United States imperialism the question of what and who constituted being Cuban remained in flux and often suspect. The first book to explore Cuban racial and sexual politics in New York during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Suspect Freedoms chronicles the largely unexamined and often forgotten history of more than a hundred years of Cuban exile migration diaspora and community formation. Nancy Raquel Mirabal delves into the rich cache of primary sources archival documents literary texts club records newspapers photographs and oral histories to write what Michel Rolph Trouillot has termed an unthinkable history. Situating this pivotal era within larger theoretical discussions of potential future visibility and belonging Mirabal shows how these transformations complicated meanings of territoriality gender race power and labor. She argues that slavery nation and the fear that Cuba would become another Haiti were critical in the making of early diasporic Cubanidades and documents how by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Afro Cubans were authors of their own experiences; organizing movements publishing texts and establishing important political revolutionary and social clubs. Meticulously documented and deftly crafted Suspect Freedoms unravels a nuanced and vital history From publishers website Introduction: Diasporic histories and archival hauntings Rhetorical geographies : annexation fear and the impossibility of Cuban diasporic whiteness 1840 1868 With painful interest : the Ten Years War masculinity and the politics of revolutionary Blackness 1865 1898 In darkest anonymity : labor revolution and the uneasy visibility of Afro Cubans in New York 1880 1901 Orphan politics : race migration and the trouble with new colonialisms 1898 1945 Monumental desires and defiant tributes : Antonio Maceo and the early history of El Club Cubano Inter Americano 1945 1957 Epilogue