A Cuban City, Segregated: Race and Urbanization in the Nineteenth Century by Bonnie A. Lucero

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Cuban City, Segregated: Race and Urbanization in the Nineteenth Century by Bonnie A. Lucero Richard Lee Turits Bonnie A. Lucero, A Cuban City, Segregated: Race and Urbanization in the Nineteenth Century. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019. 288 pp. Through the prism of social geography and the history of one town, Cienfuegos, Bonnie Lucero provides a fascinating and original contribution to our knowledge of the workings of white domination and antiblack racism in nineteenth-century Cuba. The island was then one of the largest slave plantation societies in the history of the Americas. Lucero's primary focus, though, is not on plantations or slavery but on white Cubans' efforts to control urban public spaces in order to exclude and subordinate free people of color. Lucero's story is also one of determined, often entrepreneurial, and somewhat effective black resistance to white strategies of control. That resistance, in turn, provoked new white efforts to restrict people of color in Cienfuegos's streets, neighborhoods, and institutions. Lucero opens by chronicling the development of Cienfuegos in the late 1810s as an explicitly "white" town. It was one of several "colonies" established [End Page 324] at that time for migrants from Europe and the United States, whom colonial officials hoped to entice with land and travel grants. The king intended, he wrote, to "promote the augmentation of the white population on the island" (20). Colonial authorities saw this, Lucero suggests, as a means of reducing the threat to slave owners and the economy posed by potentially widespread resistance among an expanding enslaved population at the time. The crown's commitment to white colonization, though, was evidently modest. Fewer than six hundred white immigrants settled in Cienfuegos in its early years before state funding began to run out. At the same time, white Cubans came to Cienfuegos in increasing numbers and brought with them the many African-descended people they held in slavery. Free people of color also settled in the city, a good portion of whom "quickly established themselves as property owners on the peripheries of the colony" (188) and a large number of whom were women. Many had previously been enslaved. Some were born in Africa. Lucero shows how an economically diverse free black population formed cohesive communities in multiple neighborhoods in Cienfuegos. They composed 28 percent of the city's residents by 1858. This was roughly twice the proportion of free people of color in Cuba overall. Not surprisingly, then, Cienfuegos was "stripped of the title 'white colony'" already by 1833 (40). Yet, Lucero argues, city officials remained committed to sustaining white supremacy by other means, through segregation and other forms of racial hierarchy. Most black people lived outside the town's center in neighborhoods with virtually no white residents. Municipal ordinances helped keep it that way, with new requirements, for instance, that structures in the "historic city center" be made of stone rather than wood, something that few black people could afford. City laws also demanded performances of racial inequality in public arenas where white and black residents did interact. When Afro-Cubans ventured "to the town center" for "work, food, leisure," Lucero writes, they were legally obligated to "cede the sidewalk to whites when passing each other" and forbidden from gathering "at public stores" (68). Lucero makes clear that racial hierarchy was established in both law and practice in Cienfuegos, and Cuba overall, until the 1870s. At that time, though, the dynamics of racism began to change. Spain took steps to end both slavery and the most obvious forms of legal racism, such as bans on people of color in higher education and restrictions on marriage between "individuals of 'unequal' status" (118). Such steps were arguably a necessity for Spanish colonial leaders, as they sought to counter the vast mobilization of enslaved and free people of color in the independence wars between 1868 and 1880, wars that failed to overthrow Spanish rule but did revolutionize the island in important ways. A substantial number of people now liberated from slavery migrated to Cienfuegos, seeking to make real their hard-won freedoms. In these years the [End Page 325] city's black residents overall "made increasingly bold claims to...