Abstract
This article explores the ways in which Cuban-based merchants and planters attempted to keep a robust control upon their increasingly large slave population, while endeavouring to show to the rest of the world an idyllic picture of Cuban slavery. By using James C. Scott's concepts of ‘Hidden’ and ‘Public Transcripts’, the article examines primary sources produced precisely by those merchants and planters, sources that were meant to be kept between them. Thus, the article offers a window into their world and a good tool to understand their reasoning.
Highlights
This article explores the ways in which Cuban-based merchants and planters attempted to keep a robust control upon their increasingly large slave population, while endeavouring to show to the rest of the world an idyllic picture of Cuban slavery
100 ACADEMIC ARTICLE – Manuel Barcia and planters joined forces in a vain effort to portray Cuban slavery as a harmless and paternalistic institution, exempt from the brutalities that they shrewdly attributed to other slave systems in the Americas
Much in the same spirit that had saturated the public transcript of the slave owners for the previous five or six decades, Valdés complained about the false perception that foreign public opinion had of the Spanish slave system in Cuba
Summary
This article explores the ways in which Cuban-based merchants and planters attempted to keep a robust control upon their increasingly large slave population, while endeavouring to show to the rest of the world an idyllic picture of Cuban slavery.
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