Throughout Cuban history, the recognition of Afro-Cuban difference has been expressed through various dimensions of the national stage: slave revolts and conspiracies in the colonial period; black generals in the struggle for Cuban independence in the nineteenth century; the brief but memorable existence of the Partido Independiente de Color (Independent Party of Colour), which  
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[^0]:    20 The last three societies to abolish slavery in the Americas were Puerto Rico in 1873, Cuba in 1883, and Brazil in 1888. The last ship that brought enslaved Africans to the Americas arrived in Cuba in 1873. See Iglesias.
21 There is a relatively large body of scholarship in the emergence of languages of afrocubanidad and negritud in Cuba. See especially de la Fuente, Fernández Robaina, and Ortiz.  
was founded in 1908 and which disappeared with the massacre of 1912; a plurality of expressions in the arts, music and dance, literature, cinema, theatre, and performance. In regard to cultural expressions of Afro-Cuban history and identity, let us highlight afrocubanismo, an aesthetic movement of the 1930s that should be considered together with the Harlem Renaissance and Negritude as pillars of the black modernism that had repercussions during the wave of antisystemic movements of the period. ${ }^{22}$ In this context, it is germane to remember Arturo Alfonsho Schomburg, an Afro-Puerto Rican who founded what is still the principal archive of the African diaspora and who was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, serving as a bridge between the diaspora in the North and the South. ${ }^{23}$ In sum, the use of a variety of signifiers for blackness, such as negro, mulata, sociedades de color and afrocubana, demonstrates the plurality of racial labels which exists in Cuba, which resembles the rest of Latin America, but has its own particular force.