The connected stories of revolution and slavery
Freedom’s Mirror
Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution
During the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804, arguably the most radical revolution of the modern world, slaves and former slaves succeeded in ending slavery and establishing an independent state. Yet on the Spanish island of Cuba barely fifty miles distant, the events in Haiti helped usher in the antithesis of revolutionary emancipation.
When Cuban planters and authorities saw the devastation of the neighboring colony, they rushed to fill the void left in the world market for sugar, to buttress the institutions of slavery and colonial rule, and to prevent "another Haiti" from happening in their own territory.
Freedom's Mirror follows the reverberations of the Haitian Revolution in Cuba, where the violent entrenchment of slavery occurred at the very moment that the Haitian Revolution provided a powerful and proximate example of slaves destroying slavery.
By creatively linking two stories—the story of the Haitian Revolution and that of the rise of Cuban slave society—that are usually told separately, Ada Ferrer sheds fresh light on both of these crucial moments in Caribbean and Atlantic history.
Freedom’s Mirror has won several notable awards, including the Frederick Douglass Book Prize for the Best Book on Slavery, Abolition and Resistance, from the Gilder Lehrman Center, Yale University.
See below for additional awards, praise, and interviews.
Awards and Praise
Winner, Frederick Douglass Book Prize for the Best Book on Slavery, Abolition and Resistance, Gilder Lehrman Center, Yale University
Winner, Friedrich Katz Prize for the Best Book in Latin American History, American Historical Association
Winner, Wesley-Logan Prize for the Best Book in African Diaspora History, American Historical Association
Winner, James A. Rawley Prize for the Best Book in Atlantic History, American Historical Association
Winner, Haitian Illumination Prize for the Best Book in Haitian Studies, Haitian Studies Association
Marysa Navarro Best Book Award, New England Council on Latin American Studies
Honorable Mention, PROSE Award, European and World History
“Freedom's Mirror offers a fresh perspective and links these two nations together in a complex web, in which sugar slavery declined in Haiti just as it rose in Cuba. Ferrer's research is most impressive, she fills her pages with proslavery Cuban generals, African slaves in both colonies, refugee 'French Negroes,' and Haitian leaders who hoped to weaken slavery on the islands that surrounded them. Freedom's Mirror will force even specialists to reconsider this era." At the same time, "one of Ferrer's greatest successes is her rendering of the complex politics in a beautifully written and understandable way that will be readily followed by readers with minimal knowledge of nineteenth-century Cuba, Haiti, and the Spanish Caribbean."
—Frederick Douglass Book Prize Citation
“Ada Ferrer has crafted a work of remarkable insight and methodological brilliance. Many evoke Haiti's hemispheric significance as an impulse for liberation and conservative re-entrenchment; no one so meticulously traces the interdependencies of freedom and enslavement, incorporating diplomatic, military, and social history as well as extraordinarily imaginative textual analysis. Ferrer's chapter on the Aponte rebellion is a tour de force, ingeniously unraveling the enigmatic strands that bound Haiti, Cuba, and the African diaspora in the Age of Revolution.”
—Friedrich Katz Prize Citation
Author Interviews
The Public Archive, February 2015
Dark Specters and Black Kingdoms: An interview with historian Ada Ferrer
New Books Network, July 2015
Ada Ferrer, Freedom's Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution
