By the end of the nineteenth century in Cuba, home to one of the largest and most vibrant black populations in the Americas, people of African descent were organized into a national network, the Directorio de las Sociedades de Color (Directory of Societies of Colour). The adoption of the expression gente de color (people of colour) reveals a coalition between negros and mulatos and between enslaved and free blacks, in what was one of the last societies to abolish slavery in the Americas. ${ }^{20}$ The multiple meanings of negro have a long history in Cuba and Puerto Rico, where the signifier has historically been used as a racial slur through such expressions as negro sucio (equivalent to 'dirty nigger') and the diminutive negrito, a form of infantilization that could now signal familiarity or even affection, without recognition of its racist underpinnings. Negro can also be used by dark-skinned people and people of colour as an expression of selfpride and as a marker of community. The book El Negro en Cuba 1902-1958: Apuntes para la historia de la lucha contra la discriminación racial, by Afro-Cuban intellectual Tomás Fernández Robaina, recounts the historical construction of such a sense of community through collective actions. Cuba is also a place of historical importance for the prefix 'Afro-', signifying 'of African descent', as demonstrated in the formation of the Sociedad de Estudios Afro-Cubanos (Society for Afro-Cuban Studies) in the early twentieth century. ${ }^{21}$ A recently edited volume recasting Cuban history through the lens and agency of black women titled Afrocubanas: Historia, Pensamiento y Prácticas Culturales reveals the hidden history of Cubanía ('Cubanness') through the herstory of Afro-Cuban women, looking back to the nineteenth century. The use of both afrocubano and negro as signifiers of black Cubanness shows consciousness of Afro-Cuban specificity within the national constellation of cultural practices and ethnicracial identities.