for liberation from slavery itself and their participation in the failed rebellion of the Ten Years' War. Rebecca Scott (1994:81) reports that in the early 1860s, 173,000 slaves resided on around 1,500 sugar estates in Cuba. Before slavery was outlawed in 1886, over 100,000 former slaves had already gained freedom through self-purchase, flight, legal means, and individual arrangements. In addition the Pact of Zanjón with Spain at the conclusion of the Guerra Chiquita had secured the freedom of all slaves who had fought for the rebel cause. It is in the intermediary period after the Guerra Chiquita and before the War of Independence that the debate over the Afro-Cubans' role in previous wars and their participation in future liberation armies was to determine the character of their nationalist identity and the eventual betrayal which Afro-Cuban veterans experienced after 1898.
             The debate was over the question of gratitude. Focusing on the writings of Afro-Cuban journalists in the early 1890s, Ferrer (1995:254-268) documents the reactions of Juan Gualberto Gómez and Rafael Serra to the general feeling among white Cubans that the abolition of slavery indebted ex-slaves and all people of the raza de color to political allegiance with the Autonomist Party for voting purposes. According to Serra in 1893, while not disputing that whites had led the previous war efforts, Afro-Cubans had not been graciously freed by their white masters, but instead they had fought for their freedom in the war and were thus 'entitled' to equality. This argument was rebutted by Manuel Sanguily who reaffirmed white preeminence in the Ten Years' War and reasserted that black indebtedness to white Cubans should be expressed by political allegiance.
             To understand Gómez' conceptualization of Afro-Cuban nationalism, we must first turn to the thoughts of Jóse Martí who espoused a qualified racial equality. An anti-annexationist...