Learning from “La Revolución”: The Cuban Ten Years’ War and Debates over International Recognition in the United States, 1868–78

Perhaps no other term in international politics and law is more ubiquitous than “sovereignty.” But this very ubiquity masks a complex and contested history. As scholars like Tamar Herzog and Eliga Gould have argued, sovereignty has never simply meant what legal theorists say it does. Rather, its meaning has been the product of a dialogue among a range of actors in many different places — metropolitan policymakers, to be sure, but also ordinary people of all stripes who possessed their own vernacular ideas about what constituted valid political authority.

“Learning from ‘la Revolución’” reconstructs a pivotal episode in the history of ideas about sovereignty in mid-19th century North America. It argues that people in the United States developed a new vision of sovereignty through their involvement with and observations of a nationalist rebellion in Cuba that lasted from 1868 to 1878. This vision, which regarded human rights concerns as important criteria for assessing claims to political independence, was articulated by Cuban rebels and taken up by their allies in the United States, including African Americans and radical white Republicans. It clashed with a more traditional definition of sovereignty advanced by elite legal thinkers, one which professed indifference to moral considerations and instead treated the existence of a de facto government as the true test of political independence and authority.

My paper will reconstruct these two visions of sovereignty, track their origins and circulation, and trace the contours of the debate between them. Additionally, it will reflect on the afterlife of this debate in U.S. internationalist thought.