The Epic of Cuba Libre : University of Virginia Press : 9780813948157 : 0813948150 : 30 Jun 2022 : Between 1868 and 1898, three generations of Cubans fought to free Cuba from colonialist Spain. More than a century later, no other historical narrative is as beloved and ritualistically recited as the story of Cuba Libre and the citizen-soldier known as the mambí. In town festivals and cartoons, in textbooks and hymns, in the national currency and logos alike, the mambí is the foremost icon of Cuba's past and present. Scrutinizing how this figure has been aesthetically rendered in literature, historiography, cinema, and monuments, Éric Morales-Franceschini teases out the emancipatory promises that the story of Cuba Libre came to embody in the twentieth-century popular imagination. The story of Cuba Libre and the mambí is not, after all, a conventional epic. For how does one account for heroes that are neither demigods nor nobles? For tactics more sly than virtuous? Or verse more populist