The laborante was a revolutionary identity of the Ten Years' War that represented those who worked clandestinely in favor of Cuban independence. The repeated invocation of the term did not emerge from a single print source, nor was its usage evolutionary such that each reference responded to a previous one. Instead, writers appropriated the term to represent anticolonial advocates from diverse sectors of Cuba's socioeconomic strata and to grapple with shifting identities. A Latinate term for “worker,”laborante intimates the changing dynamic between elites, the working class, and slaves. This article examines the uses of laborante to show how Cuban identity was negotiated in different but related moments. It also explores why elites may have cultivated the worker, a figure of limited economic power, to represent their aspirations for increased political freedom, and what this implies about the agents of the revolution.