The Best-Selling Cuban War of Independence Books of All Time

It is 1896. Cuba has fought three wars for independence and still is not free. People have been rounded up in reconcentration camps with too little food and too much illness. Rosa is a nurse, but she dares not go to the camps. So she turns hidden caves into hospitals for those who know how to find her. Black, white, Cuban, Spanish―Rosa does her best for everyone. Yet who can heal a country so torn apart by war? Acclaimed poet Margarita Engle has created another breathtaking portrait of Cuba.

The Surrender Tree is a 2009 Newbery Honor Book, the winner of the 2009 Pura Belpre Medal for Narrative and the 2009 Bank Street - Claudia Lewis Award, and a 2009 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

From 1895 to 1898, Cuban insurgents fought to free their homeland from Spanish rule. Though often overshadowed by the "Splendid Little War" of the Americans in 1898, according to John Tone, the longer Spanish-Cuban conflict was in fact more remarkable, foreshadowing the wars of decolonization in the twentieth century. Employing newly released evidence--including hospital records, intercepted Cuban letters, battle diaries from both sides, and Spanish administrative records--Tone offers new answers to old questions concerning the war.

He examines the origin of Spain's genocidal policy of "reconcentration"; the causes of Spain's military difficulties; the condition, effectiveness, and popularity of the Cuban insurgency; the necessity of American intervention; and Spain's supposed foreknowledge of defeat. The Spanish-Cuban-American war proved pivotal in the histories of all three countries involved. Tone's fresh analysis will provoke new discussions and debates among historians and human rights scholars as they reexamine the war in which the concentration camp was invented, Cuba was born, Spain lost its empire, and America gained an overseas empire.

In 1896, an illiterate, fifteen-year-old Afro-Cuban field hand joined the rebel army fighting for Cuba's independence. Though poor and uneducated, Ricardo Batrell believed in the promise of Cuba Libre, the vision of a democratic and egalitarian nation that inspired the Cuban War of Independence. After the war ended in 1898, Batrell taught himself to read and write and published a memoir of his wartime experiences, Para la Historia.

Originally published in 1912-the same year in which the Cuban government massacred more than 5,000 Afro-Cubans-this work of both protest and patriotism is the only autobiographical account of the war written by an Afro-Cuban soldier. After the war, Batrell became dismayed by the Cuban Republic's rapid retreat from the revolution's democratic ideals. Government corruption, racial discrimination, and the systematic exclusion of black veterans from public service had helped to reassert the racial hierarchy of colonial Cuba. With his memoir, Batrell hoped to remind Cubans about the participation of Afro-Cubans in the war (as much as 80 percent of the Cuban Liberation Army may have been Afro-Cuban) and to protest their subjugation in its aftermath. Now available for the first time in English, Batrell's powerful memoir provides profound insights into the role of race in the nation's history. Deftly rendering Batrell's forceful and energetic prose into English, Mark A. Sanders also puts forth a critical introduction that contextualizes Batrell's perspective within Cuba's colonial history and its racial politics.