Nineteenth-century Cuba Research Articles

Colonial Reckoning: Race and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

Colonial Reckoning: Race and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

The “Primitive” <em>Cecilia Valdés</em>. A short story by  Cirilio Villaverde. A translation and introduction by Thomas Genova

ABSTRACT: The text is the first English translation of Cirilo Villaverde’s 1839 “primitive” Cecilia Valdés, a short story that the author penned decades before publishing his canonical novel by the same name. The 1882 novel narrates the unwittingly incestuous relationship between the novel’s eponymous mulata heroine and her creole half-brother Leonardo Gamboa. Though the work enjoys high-canonical status, its textual history, tightly entangled with nineteenth-century Cuba’s racially fraught struggle for independence, is largely unknown to non-specialists. The translation is preceded by an introduction that discusses the short story’s relationship to the novel and the racial and political ideas present in the earlier text, as well as the translator’s efforts to render these paradigms legible to an English-language readership. keywords: Cirilio Villaverde, Cecilia Valdés, Cuba 19th century, Afrolatinidades, Latin American literature in translation, literary translation

Social Struggle and Civil Society in Nineteenth Century Cuba, by Richard E. Morris (ed.)

Social Struggle and Civil Society in Nineteenth Century Cuba, by Richard E. Morris (ed.)

A Emergência da Família Chaple à Elite Liberal: Advogados e Mobilidade Socialna Cuba de Meados do Século XIX

As migrant families relocated to Cuba during the second half of the eighteenth century, new generations of creoles were born during the economic and demographic expansion of the island. Some of these Cubans, inspired on early liberal ideas, found the ways to amass a fortune, and started climbing the social ladder by procuring positions in the local bureaucracy. A legal degree, however, was essential to obtain a high ranked public office, and many new students of law enrolled at the University of Havana. As a result, the number of lawyers on the island multiplied and started occupying posts in the local judiciary and the administration, as well as the academia, to legitimize themselves in the Cuban society. This study thus uses the Chaple family to examine a case of social mobility in early nineteenth century Cuba tied to the increase of the number of legal professionals, and their multiple mechanisms to gain participation and control of the public sphere. As the family Chaple illustrates, legal professionals, with their growing connections, created a complex social, political, and familiar network that included many individuals who held key judicial and administrative positions on the island. These lawyers, who came from humble origins, transformed the colonial society by breaking traditional barriers to the legal education and practice. Consequently, creoles with law degrees, who increasingly participated in local public affairs, emerged as a first generation of Cuban liberal elites during the nineteenth century.

Fearful loyalty: The strategic deployment of emotion by the Cuban proslavery elite, 1830–1850

ABSTRACT This article presents the expression of colonial loyalty in nineteenth century Cuba as a tool mobilised by otherwise disenfranchised enslaving elites seeking to shape the island’s governance. Combined with the judicious expression of fear, this paper suggests that “fearful loyalty” was deployed to influence the Spanish colonial government on the subject of slavery. Contemporary periodicals from the USA, examined here, presented Cuban loyalty as effeminate and baffling. Employing the methodology of History of Emotions to analyse private correspondence between Cuban enslavers, Captain Generals in Cuba, and the metropolitan government in Spain, this study rebuts that outsider impression. Adding depth to our understanding of Atlantic History, this article argues that fearful loyalty was a creolised emotional protocol utilised by enslavers and pro-slave trade individuals when attempting to manipulate the Crown to follow the course of action they considered most advantageous to their interests regarding slavery, censorship, and abolition.

Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba's Plantations

It has long been recognized that the law of the Spanish empire was more supportive of manumission than was the case with other New World slave regimes. Adriana Chira's Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba's Plantations gives us a nuanced look at the role of law in regulating the lives and possibilities of freedom for quasi-free and enslaved persons in one Spanish venue, Santiago de Cuba in the nineteenth century. Chira's choice of Santiago, on the eastern part of the island, provides us with a particularly appropriate jurisdiction in which to look at the processes and strategies that people used to gain freedom or at least a freer status. Located far enough away from the large sugar plantations that would transform the worlds of race and slavery in Cuba in the nineteenth century, Santiago was a venue whose economic conditions supported a large free population of color engaged in small-scale farming. These conditions facilitated the growth of quasi-free people who were able to lawfully purchase shares of their own lives and to hope for eventual purchase of total freedom.In the first chapter Chira traces slavery and freedom in Santiago from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. With conditions more suited to tobacco farming than sugar cultivation, the region became home to numerous small farms and a population of African descent that was able to purchase free or partially free status. The Spanish crown, wary of possible slave rebellion, had policies that were designed to limit the number of African captives brought to the island. The crown also had policies designed to encourage or at least facilitate manumission. All of this contributed to the growth of a free population of color, many of whom might have logically seen themselves as stakeholders in the Spanish imperial system, as witnessed by their participation in the militia, utilization of the courts, and manipulation of political patronage.Because Santiago escaped the sugar boom that transformed Cuba in the nineteenth century, the region also escaped some of the harshness that came with the expansion of the plantation economy and the increase in the African slave trade. The east remained somewhat underdeveloped, which led to somewhat greater autonomy for Santiago's population of African descent. The revolution in Saint-Domingue would heighten the concerns of Spanish authorities over possible rebelliousness, as would the arrival of French-speaking refugees from Hispaniola. This new fear would lead to increased governmental and legal support for manumission.Chira takes us through Cuba's nineteenth century, including the earliest rebellions that would ultimately culminate in Cuba's independence. But it is in her discussion of how the slave and partially free population used the law to gain partial or full freedom that Chira makes her strongest contribution. Chira's portrait of nineteenth-century Santiago society is nuanced and textured, reflecting a society where race and color as well as slavery and freedom came in complex and overlapping layers. Phenotype might set a presumption as to an individual's color or racial status, but it was a presumption that might be overcome by social, economic, political, and military accomplishments. There were individuals who were free and others who were enslaved, but there was also the possibility of purchasing a part of one's freedom, a topic previously explored in Michelle McKinley's Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600–1700 (2016). This possibility in turn made the law a vehicle for settling not only disputes between those who claimed ownership of an individual and those who claimed their manumitted status but also legal quarrels over fractions of ownership of human beings.Patchwork Freedoms is at its best in taking us through the legal processes that determined what quantum of freedom an individual was entitled to claim. The enslaved and quasi-enslaved people of Santiago became skillful navigators of the legal system, with an ability to use formal and customary law in the quest for greater freedom. They were also adept at using patronage networks, especially connections with free and quasi-free people of color that enabled slaves and partially free individuals to earn the money for self-purchase.With Patchwork Freedoms, Adriana Chira has helped to expand our understanding of race and slavery in the Spanish empire. Her localized study guides the reader through the varied considerations—economic circumstances, imperial rivalries, shifting racial ideologies, and political and legal change—that determined the fate of many peoples of African descent in nineteenth-century Cuba. The book is a critical addition to the burgeoning field of Afro-Latin history.

Rice in the Time of Sugar: The Political Economy of Food in Cuba

Louis Pérez, author of more than a dozen books on modern Cuba and Cuban-American relations, here turns his hand to the history of Cuban rice. Historians interested in Cuban agriculture have written abundantly and wonderfully on sugar and tobacco. They have shown much less interest in Cuban food and food production. Pérez emphasizes early on the importance of rice to Cuban meals and diets, and its centrality to Cuban food culture. He stresses the irony that while Cubans for two centuries have been great rice eaters, trailing only some Asian populations in per capita rice consumption, they have never been great rice producers. Although Cuban landscapes, especially in the westernmost third of the island, are suited to rice growing, at many points in their history Cubans have imported 90 percent or more of their rice. This mismatch between production and consumption is what Pérez wishes to explain, especially for the years between 1840 and 1960. His stated aim is “to lift rice out of historiographical obscurity, to situate rice at the center of the very way to think about the Cuban past” (p. 23).Pérez burrows inside the politics of rice in both Cuba and the United States. At the heart of the book lies the fact that both Cuba and Louisiana could grow both sugar and rice. As a result of the growing involvement of the United States in Cuban affairs, the fate of Cuban rice farmers and rice production hinged on tariff deals between the two countries. If the US Congress and Commerce Department were to give Cuban sugar a warm welcome in US markets, then, in exchange, Cuba would have to allow US rice favorable terms. Given that economies of scale were more easily achieved by US rice farmers than their Cuban counterparts, trade deals that suited Cuban sugar producers always handicapped (uncompetitive) Cuban rice farmers. As Pérez puts it, “US rice producers had no better allies than Cuban sugar producers” (p. 25). Many Cubans lamented the lack of homegrown rice, and several governments sought to bolster rice farming, to little effect. Even Fidel Castro, who changed so much, could not change Cuba's dependence on foreign rice.Chapter 1 revisits the rise of sugar and decline of subsistence food production in nineteenth-century Cuba. Rice from South Carolina and Georgia helped make Cuban specialization in sugar feasible. By midcentury, sugar producers dominated Cuban agriculture and those aspects of policy that Spain (Cuba's colonial master before 1898) left to Cubans. Chapter 2 charts the course of rice imports from the 1890s to about 1920, an era when Cubans produced almost no rice of their own. They imported rice from several Asian countries, but the interruptions to maritime shipping brought on by World War I obliged Cubans to rely heavily on US rice for the first time. Chapter 3 explains that Asian rice reclaimed its place in Cuban markets in the 1920s, that Cuban efforts to boost rice production in the late 1920s brought meager results, and that in 1937–38 the US government negotiated new tariffs giving American rice farmers an edge over Asian ones in the Cuban market. The disruptions of World War II encouraged Cubans to try to grow more of their own rice, which they did, tripling output—but still accounting for only 3 percent of Cuban farm acreage. Chapters 4 and 5 detail the politics of rice and sugar in the 1950s. In the early 1950s, against the backdrop of a struggling economy, the Fulgencio Batista government made efforts once again to expand rice production, which had the potential to resolve the summer underemployment that came with the seasonality of sugar growing. But in 1956 Batista reversed course under pressure from sugar interests. An epilogue takes the story through the last 60 years, ending much where matters began, with Cuba importing the bulk of its rice.Pérez did research in at least eight cities. He used official documents, the press, trade publications, travel literature, and much else. The underlying research effort is one of the book's strengths. The audience that Pérez had in mind seems to be fellow scholars. The sources sometimes dominate the story, with long quotations from one or another official. A few quotations appear only in Spanish.The weakest feature in a strong book, in my judgment, is contextualization. Pérez focuses so intently on trade negotiations that he mentions only in passing important constraints and conditions that shape his larger story, such as the idea of comparative advantage and the ideology of free trade or the anxieties of Cold War Washington.

The Power of Their Will: Slaveholding Women in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

The Power of Their Will: Slaveholding Women in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

Havana on Steam Power: Literature, the Railroad, and the City in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

Havana on Steam Power: Literature, the Railroad, and the City in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

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

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...

Black British Migrants in Cuba: Race, Labor, and Empire in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean, 1898–1948 by Jorge L. Giovannetti-Torres

Reviewed by: Black British Migrants in Cuba: Race, Labor, and Empire in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean, 1898–1948 by Jorge L. Giovannetti-Torres Aldo A. Lauria Santiago Jorge L. Giovannetti-Torres, Black British Migrants in Cuba: Race, Labor, and Empire in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean, 1898–1948. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2018. 318 pp. Black British Migrants in Cuba is an impressive, in-depth history of the migration and experience of British Caribbean people, most of them Black, in Cuba during the first half of the twentieth century. Sugar mills that were US, Canadian, and locally owned required vast numbers of laborers for cane cutting and other kinds of manual labor. Under American tutelage, Cuban authorities allowed what was often privately controlled migration of workers from the rest of the Caribbean. Migrants were persistently seen as threatening aliens in racist terms. The book is framed by a fascinating idea: how could black colonial subjects consider their liberation from colonialism and racism from within their diasporic condition? A second persistent theme is the long tradition of antiblack racism and fear and the particular forms these took in nineteenth and early twentieth century Cuba. The book is based on extensive archival research in dozens of archives in nine countries. It is difficult to imagine a more thorough work of archival research, especially as it includes sources drawn from the diverse local origins of English Caribbean migrants as well as the places in Cuba that ended being permanent or temporary home for thousands. The author also carried out many oral histories and identified older ethnographic materials in various archival sites. The one persistent claim through the book is the weight of the (sometimes indistinguishable) complex multiple forms of subordination (and agency) of immigrant workers: as black, colonial, and migrant guest workers with few rights in Cuba subjected to exploitation, violence, and mistreatment, and as colonial subjects of the English crown, which essentially served as their own form of racially framed colonial citizenship. The most interesting dimension of this, which has been considered and debated by other authors working on the West Indian diaspora, is how well the crown and crown officials served to [End Page 329] protect and support their subjects while in Cuba (or any other country or area like the Panama Canal Zone, New York City, or Honduras). At just over three hundred pages, the book is organized into ten chapters, an introduction, and an epilogue. The introduction provides an important framing device for the book: a 1944 call for a pan-Caribbean workers' movement free from British rule, issued and supported in Cuba. Chapter 1 introduces the history of English-speaking Antillean workers in Cuba as part of larger movements of black bodies to and in the Caribbean. It also introduces readers to one of the principal contexts discussed throughout the book: the origin of the persistent fears by Cuban elites of blackness, black agency, and black bodies. This chapter reviews the history of antiblack fears, policies, and black resistance since the early nineteenth century. The book carefully traces the importance of the migrants to Cuba's sugar industry and their presence produced both mistreatment and resistance. Chapter 2 reviews the processes of departure and arrival of the migrants works through the 1940s. It covers demographics, policies, origins, and settlement through ethnographic and archival sources. The data on the diversity of people's origins and paths, and the United Fruit Company enclaves in Cuba and its pan-Caribbean networks, are especially important. The third chapter presents extensive evidence of violence against black migrants and generalized fear. Especially valuable here is the detailed discussion of the Jobabo massacre of 1917. Chapter 4 discusses the transnational networks of support claimed by English Caribbean migrants while in Cuba. Here the author provides a very nuanced discussion of how responsive British authorities, including consuls, were to the demands and claims of their subjects while in Cuba. It also considers the role of Afro-diasporic solidarities including the UNIA. The book also reviews how the migrants experienced the depression, repatriation, and the postdepression years? Next, chapter 5 considers the impact of economic crisis on migrants' work conditions, mobility, and status. It introduces evidence of the...

The Tragedy of a Man Who Cursed: On Leonardo Padura's The Novel of My Life (2002)

This article explores how in The Novel of My Life Heredia’s tragedy -that is forced exile- stems from a dynamics between colonialism and culture in Cuba. At the same time, this dynamics reveals the transatlantic concatenations between the imperial politics of Spain and the colonial character of nineteenth-century Cuba. Heredia’s tragedy, I argue, is depicted in Padura’s novel as a consequence of a socio-historical reality in which Heredia’s enlightened, or liberal, ideas about politics and independence where rather “misplaced ideas” in the Cuba of the 1820s. In other words, some of these European liberal ideas became “misplaced ideas” when they were displaced first to the Spanish context, and subsequently to the colonial context in Cuba. The incongruences between the political structures and culture of the Spanish dynastic state and enlightened European ideas reflected themselves on colonial Cuba.

Transitory Trust: Falsified Passports, Circulars, and Other Speculations in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

Abstract In nineteenth-century Cuba, the increasing and uneven use of passports for maritime travel generated confusion about their authority and encouraged their falsification. This essay explores the forgery and misuse of travel papers alongside the fabrications of an official colonial record that concealed the illegal transatlantic slave trade as it implemented documentary procedures for legal travel. Cuban officials pursued individuals who traveled without passports, with other people’s passports, or lacked other papers, with a disproportionate focus on the circulation of free people of African descent. At the same time, the limited reach of government decrees and policies complicated strict determinations of transgression. Rather than taking this as evidence of a broken system, recognizing how various actors created the conditions for a collective susceptibility both to the authority conferred by passports and to plausible falsehoods lets us view borders, individual identity, and Caribbean mobility in new light. The essay calls on historians to approach the archival record of passports and mobility by balancing our retrospective recognition of falsifications with an awareness of fluctuating estimations of documentary veracity in the past.

Interpreting the Remnants of Women’s Reproductive Crises: Physicians and the Shifting Legal Terrain of Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

In the mid-nineteenth century, Cuban authorities produced an unprecedented volume of documentation concerning the conspicuous appearance of fetal remains, infant cadavers, and abandoned infants in public places across the island. Although the physical presence of these bodies and tissue was not new to the mid-nineteenth century, the evolution of the law and a rapidly shifting urban landscape made the material evidence of women’s responses to unwanted pregnancy more legible and more meaningful to Cuba’s colonial state. Yet, for police and judges, the domains of pregnancy and childbirth remained far beyond their training and expertise. They relied on an emerging professional class of physicians to produce and interpret evidence confirming criminality. However, the ongoing professionalisation of Cuban medicine, and in particular the emergence of a medical elite of foreign-educated obstetricians, created frictions within the medical community, and between physicians and judges. Each group of men articulated different – often competing – interpretations of the evidence, which served their broader professional goals and vision of Cuba’s future. Emerging out of these confrontations over the meaning of the material remains of reproductive crises were key contradictions in the prevailing understandings of the law, ones that hinged on race, class, and gender in perceptions of criminality.

Forty-one years a slave: Agnosia and mobility in nineteenth-century Cuba

ABSTRACT On the basis of a previously unstudied testimony, this study approaches the life of a slave from a methodological standpoint at the crossroads between Literary Studies and History. On 4 October 1853, a black man stepped into the U.S. consulate in Havana. According to the testimony he gave that day, he had been born free in Charleston, South Carolina. In 1812, at the age of ten or twelve, he was hired to work on a sloop that took him to Cuba, where he was kidnapped and sold as a slave. It would take him about forty-one years to reach the consulate and petition for his freedom. Opposing agnosia (“not-knowing”) to anagnorisis (“to recognize”), I explore different ways of (not) knowing linked to complicity, hypocrisy, and illegal slavery, while at the same time analyzing the slave’s storytelling as a form of mobility.

The Emergence of the Chaple Family as Liberal Elites: Lawyers and Social Mobility in Mid-Nineteenth Century Cuba

As migrant families relocated to Cuba during the second half of the eighteenth century, new generations of creoles were born during the economic and demographic expansion of the island. Some of these Cubans, inspired on early liberal ideas, found the ways to amass a fortune, and started climbing the social ladder by procuring positions in the local bureaucracy. A legal degree, however, was essential to obtain a high ranked public office, and many new students of law enrolled at the University of Havana. As a result, the number of lawyers on the island multiplied and started occupying posts in the local judiciary and the administration, as well as the academia, to legitimize themselves in the Cuban society. This study thus uses the Chaple family to examine a case of social mobility in early nineteenth century Cuba tied to the increase of the number of legal professionals, and their multiple mechanisms to gain participation and control of the public sphere. As the family Chaple illustrates, legal professionals, with their growing connections, created a complex social, political, and familiar network that included many individuals who held key judicial and administrative positions on the island. These lawyers, who came from humble origins, transformed the colonial society by breaking traditional barriers to the legal education and practice. Consequently, creoles with law degrees, who increasingly participated in local public affairs, emerged as a first generation of Cuban liberal elites during the nineteenth century.

A Cuban City, Segregated: Race and Urbanization in the Nineteenth Century

The history of race in nineteenth-century Cuba unfolded amid a series of dramatic transformations. With the meteoric rise of Cuban slavery, the island became the focus of campaigns to abolish the slave trade, followed by three independence wars merging the imperatives of antislavery and antiracism. As Bonnie A. Lucero's A Cuban City, Segregated demonstrates, this history also took place through incremental change.Rooted in a wealth of archival research, Lucero's study provides an important perspective on colonial Cuba within a historiography dominated by studies of the city of Havana and the slave plantation. Lucero analyzes the “multiple axes of oppression” through which white residents of the city of Cienfuegos endeavored to achieve a modern ideal of “urban order” characterized most prominently by a “white city center” (p. 11). In doing so, Lucero contributes to a growing number of studies reimagining the mutually constituted histories of race and nation through increased attention to family and the rhythms of everyday life.Founded in 1819, the settlement that would come to be known as Cienfuegos was intended to combat the “Africanization” of Cuba by incentivizing white immigration to the island. Dreams of a white settlement never materialized, however, as free people of color already inhabited the region and as white residents brought with them their slaves. Though municipal laws did not explicitly mandate the exclusion of the African-descended, white residents nonetheless contrived ways to limit black property ownership to peripheral areas, resulting in the emergence of what Lucero refers to as “de facto racial segregation” (p. 48).As Cienfuegos grew into a city, the aspirations of the African-descended to acquire property continued to confront the inclinations of local authorities to control that property's development. Even as people of color took advantage of leasing practices to gain access to land, building regulations and tax codes ensured that such access was always precarious. Lucero's research shines as she reveals the ways that shifts in sugar markets abroad and war at home were particularly stressful for people of color, who generally held subordinate positions throughout Cuban society. As they inherited properties from their parents, they were more likely to have to sell these properties owing to burdensome taxes and regulations, thus curtailing the generational accumulation of wealth by Cienfuegos's black community. Nevertheless, pockets of black proprietorship matured into established neighborhoods that became coveted properties of an expanded city center.Black residents also experienced uneven access to public spaces. While a small middle class of color faced frustration as they tried to gain access to places such as schools, cafés, and theaters, local authorities acted on gendered notions of hygiene as they policed predominantly black centers of Cienfuegos's informal economy, such as the red-light district. As Lucero argues, “These mechanisms of control and containment effectively restricted the way black residents of the expanded city center could inhabit the urban space surrounding their properties” (p. 119).With the US occupation of Cuba in 1898, municipal authorities in Cienfuegos reconfigured their efforts to achieve “urban order” to conform with the racial ideologies of the United States. Black veterans of the Liberation Army were thus excluded from various jobs and levels of civic engagement, black labor organizations experienced suppression, and black neighborhoods faced displacement, engendering uncharacteristic levels of urban violence. The city's racial topography, which had historically expressed the logics of control and containment, now began to resemble the type of segregation that had taken root in the United States.The strength of Lucero's study lies in its careful research, even as aspects of her analytic framework feel slightly shopworn. Lucero relies on the concepts of de jure and de facto segregation to argue that racial integration played a less prominent role in Cuban history than the dominant narratives suggest. As legal historians of race have increasingly noted, however, the distinction between de jure and de facto segregation is more of a political artifice than a social fact. In the United States, for instance, this distinction developed over time to obscure the pervasiveness of segregation and to frustrate legal arguments equating segregation with racial discrimination. Indeed, Lucero's own use of the terms control and containment resonates far more clearly with the complicated history of exclusion and inclusion in nineteenth-century Cienfuegos than do the terms segregation and integration, with all their attendant twentieth-century meanings. At the center of her study, then, is a sophisticated analysis of the interplay between the development of urban space and racial ideologies that will be of interest to scholars of Cuban and Latin American history as well as urban history more broadly.

Slavery, mobility, and networks in nineteenth-century Cuba

ABSTRACT In the midst of a major economic restructuring known as Second Slavery, which included important debates between abolitionist and proslavery interests, Cuba experienced the emergence of new forms of mobility and networks. After being forcibly moved across the Atlantic, enslaved Africans were moved within Cuba, and sometimes sold to owners in other Caribbean islands or the U.S. South. A significant fraction of them managed to move on their own will – running away, defending their right to self-purchase, or making money that would help alleviate their situation or that of their friends and relatives. The essays included in this special issue, written by historians and literary critics, pay special attention to the ways in which human actors and ideas moved from the countryside to the city, from one Caribbean island to the next, and from the United States or the coasts of West Africa to the sugarcane fields.

Colonial Innovation System, Sub-Imperial Institutions and the Creole Elite in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

This article examines the relationship between colonialism and technology transfer via the study of nineteenth century Cuban institutions dedicated to the stimulation of innovative activity, particularly the patent system. Preliminary findings suggest three noteworthy claims. First, during the nineteenth century Cuban Creole elites set up a ‘Colonial Innovation System’ made up of ‘sub-imperial’ institutions autonomously administered in a context where rival Atlantic empires functioned as a ‘shadow’ economic metropolis of Cuba. Second, despite having the same patent laws as metropolitan Spain, Cuban sugar elites obtained practical control and management of the patent sub-institution on the island. Third, this achievement led to an autonomous functioning of the patent system in Cuba that allowed sugar-mill owners to participate actively in the global networks of technological exchange and to generate higher levels of patent activity than in metropolitan Spain.

Recuperating Rebellion: Rewriting Revolting Women in(to) Nineteenth-Century Cuba and the Philippines

Recuperating Rebellion: Rewriting Revolting Women in(to) Nineteenth-Century Cuba and the Philippines