This thesis made the author reach the scientific degree of Doctor in Historical Sciences, and its main problem centers around the intricate interrelation and the tensions between the modernizing tendencies and speeches of Cuban society, the purposes of remodeling colonial structures with imperialist ends, made by the military ocupation government from 1898 to 1902, and the complex discursive formulation and institutional implementation of a multiplicity of visions and formulations about national culture and identity.

The author wisely selected a critical period of Cuban history, which goes from 1898 to 1902, and is notable because it meant the transition between two periods of time and the configuration of a new social, economic, political and cultural order. The result approaches an original and completely novel topic of the history of culture and Cuban society, and it reaches the analytic integration of the interaction among the national and foreign political elites, and the authentic expressions of popular feeling, in the constitution of the national State and in that of the symbols that would support the new emergent political culture. In that way, it contributes to the renovation of historiographic speech, with a rigorous and interesting language at the same time, and by means of the creative and original use of the interpretive resources and the methodologies of contemporary social sciences.

The work also stands out for its capacity to examine critically the channeling of feeling and national conscience, and its defense, under those specially adverse and unknown conditions in the history of Cuba. The research is sustained in a nurtured group of sources, especially not conventional, found in Cuban and foreign archives, which constitutes a contribution to Cuban historiographic speech.