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| Ruinas del barracon de Trinidad de Oviedo. El 1ro de Dicembre de 1843,
Esteban Santa Cruz de Oviedo denunció un alzamiento que estallaría aquí
el 25 del propio mes. Este hecho está considerado como una de las
causas del inicio del proceso conocido como Conspiración de la Escalera/ ecured.cu |
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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
In 1843 multiple slave revolts
rocked the island of Cuba, including major uprisings near Matanzas and
Santiago. Widely attributed to a vast conspiracy uniting slaves, free
people of color, and a handful of whites, the revolts and alleged plot
became collectively known as La Escalera ("the ladder");
the name was derived from a torturous slave punishment used to
interrogate suspected subversives (pp. 55-57). Though historians have
long debated the conspiracy's existence and the extent to which the 1843
revolts were linked, all agree that colonial authorities used both as
grounds for the systematic disenfranchisement of Cuba's free people of
color beginning in 1844, "the year of the lash."
As Reid-Vazquez
demonstrates, the following quarter-century (1844-1868) was an
exceptionally harsh period for free women and men of African descent in
Cuba. In the immediate aftermath of La Escalera, nearly 40 free people
of color were executed, and hundreds were imprisoned or banished.
Additional repressive measures threatened Cuba's broader free colored
population with increased surveillance, semi-coerced emigration, and
occupational discrimination. Long-standing pardo and
mulatto militias were dissolved, and new immigration policies aimed to
reduce the colony's reliance on free black labor. Situating these
developments within a "cycle of rebellion and repression" that stretched
back several decades (pp. 44-47), Reid-Vazquez argues that despite
intensified oppression, Cuba's free people of color displayed a "black
agency" that "would never be fully subdued" (pp. 116 and elsewhere).
Though
perhaps most indebted to the pioneering work of Pedro Deschamps
Chapeaux, this study also represents a conscious effort to "bridge . . .
existing scholarship on Cuban race relations that focuses on the
opening and closing decades of the nineteenth century" (p.
175). The author's findings in many ways echo those of historians
Kimberly Hanger, Jane Landers, Ben Vinson, Matt Childs, and others who
have examined social networks, geographical mobility, and racial
identities among free people of color in the colonial Spanish Caribbean
and Gulf of Mexico. Foregrounding the "anxieties" of creole elites and
metropolitan officials, Reid-Vazquez also evokes the tenuous nature of
colonial rule and mounting challenges to Cuba's slave regime, thus
linking her work to scholarship on post-slave societies and racial
ideologies at the dawn of the national period.
This study relies
on newspapers, document collections, government papers, and materials
drawn from several major archives, notably the Archivo Nacional de Cuba
(Havana) and the Archivo Histórico Nacional (Madrid). The author's
primary contribution is her analysis of hundreds of petitions housed in
Cuba's national archive. In the mid-1840s, nearly 1,300 free people of
color were either banished from Cuba, imprisoned overseas, or encouraged
to emigrate (pp. 82, 203-272). From Spain and Mexico, "dozens" sent
requests for permission to return (pp. 71, 85-88). Likewise,
"foreign-born free people of color" facing expulsion petitioned to
remain on the island (pp. 75-80), and free black undertakers, barbers,
carpenters, and midwives requested exemption from racially based
occupational restrictions (pp. 105, 108). During 1859 and 1860, almost
500 petitions were submitted by free people of color hoping to avoid
compulsory militia service (pp. 135-140). The majority of these
petitions were successful, though exiles in Spain and Mexico would not
be allowed to return to Cuba until a general amnesty was proclaimed in
1857 (pp. 95-96).
Intriguingly, this study contains more than a
few references to free people of color with surnames followed by African
ethnonyms (Mandinga, Gangá, Lucumí, Carabalí, Congo). While Africa is
largely absent from the nineteenth-century Atlantic World depicted here,
and ostensible African identities are quickly subsumed within an
interpretative framework that heavily emphasizes race, this reviewer
wondered whether African-born former slaves were in some ways better
prepared than other free black exiles to cope with "ten arduous years
abroad" (p. 94). One might also speculate that free people of color who
had survived the Middle Passage may have viewed the dissolution of black
militias as something less than "a crushing blow to their identity and
honor"
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