Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation

The Afro-Cuban Fight for Freedom and Equality, 1812-1912

Aisha Finch, Fannie Rushing

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780807170991
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation offers a new perspective on black political life in Cuba by analyzing the time between two hallmark Cuban events, the Aponte Rebellion of 1812 and the Race War of 1912. In so doing, this anthology provides fresh insight into the ways in which Cubans practiced and understood black freedom and resistance, from the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution to the early years of the Cuban republic. Bringing together an impressive range of scholars from the field of Cuban studies, the volume examines, for the first time, the continuities between disparate forms of political struggle and racial organizing during the early years of the nineteenth century and traces them into the early decades of the twentieth.Matt Childs, Manuel Barcia, Gloria García, and Reynaldo Ortíz-Minayo explore the transformation of Cuba's nineteenth-century sugar regime and the ways in which African-descended people responded to these new realities, while Barbara Danzie León and Matthew Pettway examine the intellectual and artistic work that captured the politics of this period. Aisha Finch, Ada Ferrer, Michele Reid-Vazquez, Jacqueline Grant, and Joseph Dorsey consider new ways to think about the categories of resistance and agency, the gendered investments of traditional resistance histories, and the continuities of struggle that erupted over the course of the mid-nineteenth century. In the final section of the book, Fannie Rushing, Aline Helg, Melina Pappademos, and Takkara Brunson delve into Cuba's early nationhood and its fraught racial history. Isabel Hernández Campos and W. F. Santiago-Valles conclude the book with reflections on the process of history and commemoration in Cuba. Together, the contributors rethink the ways in which African-descended Cubans battled racial violence, created pathways to citizenship and humanity, and exercised claims on the nation state. Utilizing rare primary documents on the Afro-Cuban communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation explores how black resistance to exploitative systems played a central role in the making of the Cuban nation.

I

Slavery and Resistance
in the Era of Aponte

INTRODUCTION TO PART I

MATT CHILDS

The study of Cuban history and the particular role of slavery on the island has been a topic of investigation for nearly five centuries.1 The purpose of this brief introduction is to provide a historical and historiographical overview of Cuban slavery to situate the excellent chapters by Gloria García, Manuel Barcia, Bárbara Danzie, Reynaldo Ortíz-Minaya, and Matthew Pettway that make up the first section of the volume into a Cuban historical context. The chapters that comprise the first section of this volume analyze the rapid expansion of plantation slavery that followed the Haitian Revolution when Cuba became transformed into a slave society.

On February 28, 1789, the Spanish crown acknowledged the importance of the slave trade to commercial expansion, and the development of the Spanish Caribbean colonies in particular, by declaring free trade in slavery. When the two-year trial period of free trade in slaves ended in 1791, spokesman for the Cuban elite Francisco Arango y Parreño wrote to have the policy extended, stating “with all frankness . . . the free introduction [of slaves] has allowed the island to prosper.”2 Although the Cuban slave trade dates from the first decades of the sixteenth century and stands out as the longest in the history of New World slavery, it was during the period from 1789 until its final abolition in 1867 that it fundamentally altered the social, racial, and ethnic composition of the island.3 While no consensus has emerged over exact figures for total imports from 1789 to 1867, scholars have estimated that from 700,000 to as many as 1 million slaves entered Cuba. The massive importation of slaves and the radical transformations of Cuban society are all the more apparent given that in the previous 280 years only 100,000 slaves had been imported into the island.4

Cuba’s dependence on the transatlantic slave trade emerged during a precarious moment in the history of international slaving. The 1791 Haitian Revolution that destroyed the largest slave-based economy in the Caribbean and liberated roughly 400,000 Africans from bondage marked the beginning of the end for New World slavery. Yet it was precisely the destruction and liberation created by the Haitian Revolution that provided the structural opening for Cuba to enter the world sugar and coffee markets. Although the transatlantic slave trade flourished in the nineteenth century and would last in Cuba until 1867, from the early 1800s Cuban slaveholders believed the trade could be abolished at any moment due to foreign pressure. The Spanish crown won the allegiance of many Cuban slaveholders by defending slavery even while the government in Madrid signed various treaties to limit the trade because they often turned a blind eye toward the new regulations.5

Just as the Spanish crown took crucial steps to increase slave imports in 1789, it also took actions to reform the practice of slavery in the Americas. Authored in part to go along with the expansion of the slave trade, the Spanish crown issued a real cédula (royal decree) known as the Código Negro Español (slave code) that specified food and clothing provisions, set daily work hours, required religious instruction, protected marriages, and limited punishments for slaves. The response by Cuban slaveholders to the Código Negro, which they regarded as a threat to their autonomy, is very telling of their anxiety about slavery at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Slave owners saw the legislation as an intrusion by the crown into their personal lives to dictate relations between master and slave. The Código Negro specified that whippings could not exceed twenty-five. Masters feared that “of this law the firm concept that will be left with slaves is that we can not impose severe punishment, and having lost absolute fear, they will take no part in subordinating themselves to their masters and overseers . . . abandoning the plantations.” The response of Cuban slaveholders stressed that their authority rested upon the coercive power to command labor by both the threat of violence and brutal physical punishment.6

With slaves arriving in record numbers from the 1790s through the 1860s, the Cuban countryside became transformed into a classic plantation society. First and foremost among the areas of growth was sugar production. The development of the Cuban sugar plantation economy rapidly expanded in the last decade of the eighteenth century when Haiti won its independence from France in a bloody war. In the years following the slaves’ triumph, Cuba quickly moved to seize the Haitian share of the sugar market by importing slaves on a massive scale. From 1792 to 1810 the slave population in Cuba nearly tripled, growing from 84,590 to 217,400. The sugar plantation continued to expand throughout the nineteenth century. By the 1840s Cuba became the world’s primary producer of sugar, and the slave population exceeded the white for the first time in the island’s history.7

Few historians have studied the transformation of the sugar industry and its multiple effects for the larger Cuban society with the encyclopedic knowledge, critical eye for detail, familiarity with the empirical record, and expressive and engaging prose as Manuel Moreno Fraginals (1964 and 1978). Theoretically influenced by Marxist historiography, Moreno Fraginals explored the sugar economy as a system somewhat in the tradition of the French Annales school of the histoire totale. Methodologically approaching the sugar economy through the relationship between structure and superstructure, or put another way, the relationship between economics and supporting ideologies, his study elucidated important insights into the political, cultural, and intellectual features of the sugar economy. Among...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Forword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. SLAVERY AND RESISTANCE IN THE ERA OF APONTE
• Part II. BLACK POLITICAL THOUGHT AND RESISTANCE IN THE AGE OF LA ESCALERA
• Part III. RACE AND BLACKNESS IN POSTEMANCIPATION CUBA
• Afterword
• List of Contributors
• Index