Part of a series on |
Forced labour and slavery |
---|
Slavery in Cuba was a portion of the larger Atlantic slave trade that primarily supported Spanish plantation owners engaged in the sugarcane trade. It was practiced on the island of Cuba from the 16th century until it was abolished by Spanish royal decree on October 7, 1886.
The first organized system of slavery in Cuba was introduced by the Spanish Empire, which attacked and enslaved the island's indigenous Taíno and Guanahatabey peoples on a grand scale. Cuba's original population was decimated after the arrival of the Spaniards, due to both a lack of immunity to Old World diseases such as smallpox, but also because of the conditions associated with the forced labor that was used by the Spanish colonist throughout the 1500s.[ citation needed ] The remaining Taino intermixed with Europeans or African slaves and no full-blooded Taino remained after the 1600s, though many Cubans today do have Taino DNA and are descendants of those intermixed Tainos.
Following the decimation of the island's native population, the Spaniards wanted new slaves to uphold their sugarcane production. They brought more than a million enslaved African people to Cuba. The African enslaved population grew to outnumber European Cubans, and a large proportion of Cubans today descend from these enslaved peoples—perhaps as much as 65% of the population.[ citation needed ]
Cuba became one of the world's largest sugarcane producers after the Haitian Revolution and continued to import enslaved Africans long after the practice was outlawed for Spanish citizens in 1817. Cuba did not stop participating in the Atlantic slave trade until 1867, and slavery on the island was not abolished by Spain until 1886. Due to growing pressure to stop the Cuban slave trade throughout the 19th century, more than 100,000 Chinese indentured workers were imported to Cuba to replace dwindling African labor.[ citation needed ] During the 19th century, Cuban slavery was revitalized by French, Spanish and American expatriates, many of whom moved to Cuba either due to the growing importance of the island's plantation economy or the gradual abolishment of slavery elsewhere.
Since the 1550s, the Spaniards had relied on the Indigenous Taíno population for their primary enslaved labor. The Indigenous population of Cuba was facing declining numbers from disease and warfare. Many enslaved Tainos fled into the interiors of Cuba, as they were much more familiar with the land than the Spaniards were. Between the population decline and the indigenous rebellions against Spanish rule, the demand for labor in Cuba became high. The Spaniards introduced chattel slavery of West African people to remedy this labor shortage. [1]
They provided services to the garrisons of the Nueva España and Tierra Firme fleets, which arrived at the port annually. Throughout the 1500s and 1600s, slaves made up a large portion of the services sector of the city's economy and also held numerous skilled trade positions in Havana. [1] European Cuban historian [osé Martín Félix de Arrate y Acosta recalled in 1761 that "negros and pardos" were "very able and capable to apply themselves, becoming distinguished masters, not only in the lowest ones such as shoemakers, tailors, masons, and carpenters, but also in those which require more ability and genius, such as silversmith's craft, sculpture, painting, and carving, as denoted by their marvelous works." [2] Some enslaved Havanans worked under a market-based system in which the enslaved person had the responsibility of finding their own job and employer, and then giving over a portion of their earnings to their owner. [1]
Slaves in Cuba did not begin to experience the harsh conditions of plantation agriculture until after the 1770s, once the international plantation economy had expanded into Western Cuba. [1] In 1740, the Havana Company was formed to stimulate the sugar industry by encouraging the importation of slaves into Cuba, although it largely unsuccessful. [3] [ dubious – discuss ] In 1762, British forces under the Earl of Albemarle captured Havana during the Seven Years' War. [4] During their year-long occupation of Havana and surrounding regions, the British expanded the Cuban plantation system and imported 4,000 slaves from the British West Indies to work on them. This substantially expanded the number of slaves in Cuba, as just over 40,000 slaves had been imported to the island over the previous 250 years. Spain regained control of British-occupied regions of Cuba in 1763 by ceding Spanish Florida to Britain in exchange. [4]
The British had also freed 90 Cuban slaves who had sided with them during the invasion, in recognition of their contribution to the Spanish defeat. [4] Given their role in the Seven Years' War, Spanish colonial official Julián de Arriaga realized that Cuban slaves could support foreign nations that offered them freedom. He thus began to issue cartas de libertad and emancipated some two dozen slaves who had defended Havana against the British. [5] The Spanish Crown increased slave imports to ensure the loyalty of European Cuban planters and to increase revenues from the lucrative sugar trade, as the crop was then in high demand in Europe. [6]
In 1791, slaves in the French colony of Saint-Domingue rose up in rebellion. In 1803, ships carrying white and free people of color refugees arrived in Cuba from Saint-Domingue. Though all the passengers on board had been legally free under French law for years, and many of the mixed-race people had been born free, upon their arrival the Cubans classified those of even partial African descent as slaves. The white passengers were allowed entry into Cuba while African and mulatto passengers were restrained on the ships. Some of the white passengers had additionally claimed some of the Black passengers as slaves during the journey. The women of African descent and their children were particularly subject to being pressed into slavery. [7]
In the long run, Santiago de Cuba was a receptive landing point for men and women who hoped to restore the social relations of slavery, and for their project of redefining others among the refugees as slaves. Authorized since 1789 as a port of arrival for the transatlantic trade in African captives, Santiago served an expanding hinterland of plantations producing sugar and coffee. Ships arrived regularly from the west coast of Africa, delivering bound laborers into the urban and rural economy. Men and women from Saint-Domingue who brought with them both financial resources and the habit of command could make a convincing case that they – and their ‘slaves’ – offered something of value to a developing agricultural export sector. Those with more-modest resources, including men and women designated mulatos or mulatas libres, could simply point out that they needed the labor of one or two slaves to avoid becoming a charge on the Cuban government. [8]
The Haitians finally gained their independence in 1804. They declared the new Republic of Haiti, making it second Republic in the Western Hemisphere and the first founded by former slaves. Cuban slaveholders watched these events closely, but took comfort in thinking the rebellion was the result of the radical politics of the French Revolution, during which the French government had abolished slavery in the colonies before Napoleon attempted to reintroduce it shortly afterwards. [9] As the new freedmen set up small subsistence farms in Haiti, Cuba's planters gained much of the sugar market formerly held by Saint-Domingue's large plantations. [10] As sugar expanded to dominate the economy in Cuba, planters greatly expanded their importation of slaves from Africa. As a result, “between 1791 to 1805, 91,211 slaves entered the island through Havana”. [11] [ failed verification ][ page needed ]
In the early 19th century, Cuban planters, who relied almost exclusively on foreign slave traders, closely followed debates on abolishing slavery in both Britain and the United States. In 1807, the British and American governments abolished the Atlantic slave trade, with the British ban taking effect in 1807 and the American ban taking effect in 1808. [12] Unlike in the rest of the Americas, the 19th-century European-descended Cuban elite did not form an anti-colonial movement. They worried that such action would encourage enslaved Cubans to revolt. [13] Cuban elites petitioned the Spanish Crown to create an independent Cuban slave-trading company, and smugglers continued to ship slaves to the island when they could evade British and American anti-slavery patrols around West Africa. [12]
In March 1812, a series of revolts led by freedman José Antonio Aponte erupted in the plantations of Cuba. [14] After the revolts were suppressed by the local militias armed by the government, hundreds of slaves were arrested, with many of the leaders being tried and executed. [15]
By 1817, Britain and Spain were making a concerted effort to reform their diplomatic ties and negotiate the legal status of the Atlantic slave trade. An Anglo-Spanish treaty in 1817 formally gained Spanish agreement to immediately end the slave trade north of the Equator and expand enforcement against illegal slave ships. But, as recorded by legal trade documents of the era, 372,449 slaves were imported to Cuba before the slave trade legally ended, and at least 123,775 were imported between 1821 and 1853. [16]
Even as the slave trade ceased in other parts of the Atlantic, the Cuban slave trade continued on until 1867. The ownership of human beings as chattel slaves remained legal in Cuba until 1880. The slave trade in Cuba would not systematically end until chattel Cuban slavery was abolished by Spanish royal decree in 1886, making it one of the last countries in the Western Hemisphere (preceding only Brazil) to formally abolish slavery. [12] [3]
Enslaved people on sugar plantations and in sugar mills were often subject to the harshest conditions. Field work was rigorous manual labor that began at an early age. Work days lasted close to 20 hours during harvest and processing, including cultivating and cutting the crops, hauling wagons, and processing sugarcane with dangerous machinery. Enslaved people were forced to reside in barracoons, where they were crammed in and locked in by a padlock at night, getting about three to four hours of sleep. The conditions of the barracoons were highly unsanitary and extremely hot. Typically there was no ventilation; the only window was a small barred hole in the wall. [17]
"So the place swarmed with fleas and ticks that gave the entire work force infections and diseases."
Enslaved people who misbehaved, underproduced, or disobeyed their masters were often placed in stocks in boiler houses, where they were abandoned for anywhere from a few days to as much as two to three months at a time. The wooden stocks were built in both standing and prostrate varieties, and women were subjected to this and other forms of torture even when pregnant. When subjected to whippings, pregnant women had to lay "face down over a scooped-out piece of round [earth] to protect their bellies." [18] Some masters reportedly whipped pregnant women in the belly, often causing miscarriages. Enslaved Cubans developed herbal remedies to treat torture wounds where possible, applying “compresses of tobacco leaves, urine and salt" to lashing wounds in particular. [19]
Under Spanish law in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, enslaved people had certain rights and were able to appeal to authorities to ensure the enforcement of these rights. These rights were influenced by the Siete Partidas code of Alfonso X the Wise, which regulated slavery in Castile. [1] Some of these rights included the right to purchase freedom and access to Catholic sacraments, such as baptism and marriage. The purchase of freedom was often facilitated by a legal custom, coartación . Through coartación, enslaved people were able to come to agreements with their slaveholder on a price for their freedom and would pay for their manumission in installments. [1] Enslaved people who created these agreements with their slaveholders were called coartados. [1]
In 1789, the Spanish Crown led an effort to reform slavery, as the demand for enslaved labor in Cuba was growing. The Crown issued a decree, the Código Negro Español (Spanish Black Code), that specified food and clothing provisions, put limits on the number of work hours, limited punishments, required religious instruction, and protected marriages, forbidding the sale of young children away from their mothers. [10] But planters often flouted the laws and protested against them. They considered the code a threat to their authority [10] and an intrusion into their personal lives. [20]
The slave owners did not protest against all the measures of the code, many of which, they argued, were already common practices. They objected to efforts to set limits on their ability to apply physical punishment. For instance, the Black Code limited lashings to 25 and required whipping "not to cause serious bruises or bleeding". [20] The slaveholders thought that the enslaved Cubans would interpret these limits as weaknesses, ultimately leading to resistance. [20] Another contested issue was the restriction of work hours "from sunrise to sunset." Planters said that during the harvest season, the rapid cutting and processing of cane required 20-hour days. [21] Enslaved people working on plantations ultimately had minimal opportunities to claim any of these rights. Most coartados during this time were urban enslaved people. [1]
Cuban patriarchy provided a framework for projecting gender roles onto enslaved peoples. Just as the practice of machismo solidified male domination over others, the practice of marianismo elevated the position of white women over enslaved peoples. [22] Machismo and marianismo functioned symbiotically: the Hispanic Cuban male was expected to express dominance in public spaces and ventures like the slave trade, while Hispanic women exercised control of private spaces (including those staffed by enslaved people) through feminine virtues like motherhood, modesty, and honor. [22] [ page needed ]
Cuba's slavery system was gendered in that some labor was performed only by men, and some only by women. Enslaved women in the city of Havana, from the sixteenth century onwards, performed duties such as operating the town taverns, eating houses, and lodges, as well as working as laundresses and domestic laborers. Enslaved women were also forced to serve as sex slaves in the towns. [23]
Though gender roles were predominant in enslaved peoples' labor, historical narratives[ whose? ] have been interpreted[ by whom? ] in gendered ways that highlight the role of men in the resistance to slavery, while occluding the role of enslaved women. Further studies[ whose? ] show that the relationship between gender and slave revolt was complex. For instance, historical interpretations of the La Escalera conspiracy reveal the role of machismo in Cuban historiography:
As December 1843 drew to a close, an enslaved woman in the Sabanilla district named Polonia Gangá shocked her master with the information that his prized sugar property was about to be engulfed in open rebellion… But commencing the story of 1844 at the moment of Polonia's declaration also necessarily equates a woman's betrayal. [24]
A machismo historical perspective frames betrayal as one of the only possibilities for enslaved women's participation in insurrection, because it associates rebellion exclusively to masculine aggression. But despite enslaved women being viewed through this limiting lens, these women were known to have played a key role both in armed rebellion against slavery and in more subtle forms of resistance. One such leader was an enslaved woman named Carlota, who led a rebellion in the Triunvirate plantation in Matanzas in 1843. [25] She is considered a pioneer in the Cuban fight against slavery.
Enslaved women also practiced methods of resistance that did not involve armed rebellion. Cuban oral histories and newspaper advertisements indicate a contingent of formerly enslaved women who escaped from their owners. [26] And as in other Latin cultures, racial segregation was not strictly enforced between white men and the mulatta population in Cuba, so some enslaved Cuban women thus gained their freedom through familial and sexual relationships with white men. Men who took enslaved women as wives or concubines sometimes freed both them and their children. Free mixed-race people thus eventually began to constitute an additional Cuban social class in a stature beneath ethnic Europeans and above enslaved Africans. Both freedmen and free people of color, generally of mixed race, came to represent 20% of the total Cuban population and 41% of the non-white Cuban population. [27]
However, plantation owners also encouraged Afro-Cuban enslaved women to have children in order to increase their enslaved work force and replace people killed by the harsh conditions of slavery. Owners paired strong black men with healthy black women, even if they were immediate relatives, forcing them to have sex and "breed stock" of children. The children could then be sold for about 500 pesos[ when? ], and also saved owners on the cost of importing additional enslaved people from Africa. Sometimes if the owners did not like the quality of the children, they separated the parents and sent the mother back to working in the fields. [28]
El negro
junto al cañaveral.
El yanqui
sobre el cañaveral.
La tierra
bajo el cañaveral.
¡Sangre
que se nos va!English translationThe Negro
bound to the canefield.
The Yankee
above the canefield.
The earth
beneath the canefield.
Blood
seeps out of us!
Slavery left a long-lasting mark on Cuban culture that persists to the present day. Cuban writers such as Nicolás Guillén and Lydia Cabrera participated in the Pan-African Négritude movement of the early 20th century (locally known as negrista or negrismo). Afro-Cuban writers undertook a Hispanophone effort to reclaim Cuban blackness and connections to African culture, while expressing a new sensibility comparable to the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. Guillén, Cabrera, and their contemporaries revisited and tried to make sense of slavery and other crimes against Afro-Cuban people, as well as celebrating the enslaved people who had survived and created their own culture.
Slavery is the ownership of a person as property, especially in regards to their labour. Slavery typically involves compulsory work, with the slave's location of work and residence dictated by the party that holds them in bondage. Enslavement is the placement of a person into slavery, and the person is called a slave or an enslaved person.
Abolitionism, or the abolitionist movement, is the movement to end slavery and liberate enslaved individuals around the world.
The Atlantic slave trade or transatlantic slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people to the Americas. European slave ships regularly used the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage. Europeans established a coastal slave trade in the 15th century and trade to the Americas began in the 16th century, lasting through the 19th century. The vast majority of those who were transported in the transatlantic slave trade were from Central Africa and West Africa and had been sold by West African slave traders to European slave traders, while others had been captured directly by the slave traders in coastal raids. European slave traders gathered and imprisoned the enslaved at forts on the African coast and then brought them to the Americas. Some Portuguese and Europeans participated in slave raids. As the National Museums Liverpool explains: "European traders captured some Africans in raids along the coast, but bought most of them from local African or African-European dealers." Many European slave traders generally did not participate in slave raids because life expectancy for Europeans in sub-Saharan Africa was less than one year during the period of the slave trade because of malaria that was endemic in the African continent. An article from PBS explains: "Malaria, dysentery, yellow fever, and other diseases reduced the few Europeans living and trading along the West African coast to a chronic state of ill health and earned Africa the name 'white man's grave.' In this environment, European merchants were rarely in a position to call the shots." The earliest known use of the phrase began in the 1830s, and the earliest written evidence was found in an 1836 published book by F. H. Rankin. Portuguese coastal raiders found that slave raiding was too costly and often ineffective and opted for established commercial relations.
The history of the Caribbean reveals the region's significant role in the colonial struggles of the European powers since the 15th century. In the modern era, it remains strategically and economically important. In 1492, Christopher Columbus landed in the Caribbean and claimed the region for Spain. The following year, the first Spanish settlements were established in the Caribbean. Although the Spanish conquests of the Aztec empire and the Inca empire in the early sixteenth century made Mexico and Peru more desirable places for Spanish exploration and settlement, the Caribbean remained strategically important.
The institution of slavery in the European colonies in North America, which eventually became part of the United States of America, developed due to a combination of factors. Primarily, the labor demands for establishing and maintaining European colonies resulted in the Atlantic slave trade. Slavery existed in every European colony in the Americas during the early modern period, and both Africans and indigenous peoples were targets of enslavement by Europeans during the era.
Sugar plantations in the Caribbean were a major part of the economy of the islands in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Most Caribbean islands were covered with sugar cane fields and mills for refining the crop. The main source of labor, until the abolition of chattel slavery, was enslaved Africans. After the abolition of slavery, indentured laborers from India, China, Portugal and other places were brought to the Caribbean to work in the sugar industry. These plantations produced 80 to 90 percent of the sugar consumed in Western Europe, later supplanted by European-grown sugar beet.
Slavery in the British and French Caribbean refers to slavery in the parts of the Caribbean dominated by France or the British Empire.
Slavery in the Spanish American viceroyalties included indigenous peoples, enslaved people from Africa, and enslaved people from Asia. The economic and social institution of slavery existed throughout the Spanish Empire including Spain itself. Enslaved Africans were brought over to the continent for their labour, indigenous people were enslaved until the 1543 laws that prohibited it.
Engenho is a colonial-era Portuguese term for a sugar cane mill and the associated facilities. In Spanish-speaking countries such as Cuba and Puerto Rico, they are called ingenios. Both words mean engine. The word engenho usually only referred to the mill, but it could also describe the area as a whole including land, a mill, the people who farmed and who had a knowledge of sugar production, and a crop of sugar cane. A large estate was required because of the massive amount of labor needed to yield refined sugar, molasses, or rum from raw sugar cane. These estates were prevalent in Brazil, Cuba, Dominican Republic, and other countries in the Caribbean. Today, Brazil is still one of the world's major producers of sugar.
Afro–Puerto Ricans, most commonly known as Afroboricuas, but also occasionally referred to as Afroborinqueños,Afroborincanos, or Afropuertorros, are Puerto Ricans of full or partial sub-Saharan African origin, who are predominately the descendants of slaves, freedmen, and free Blacks original to West and Central Africa. The term Afro-Puerto Rican is also used to refer to historical or cultural elements in Puerto Rican society associated with this community, including music, language, cuisine, art, and religion.
La Amistad was a 19th-century two-masted schooner owned by a Spaniard living in Cuba. It became renowned in July 1839 for a slave revolt by Mende captives who had been captured and sold to European slave traders and illegally transported by a Portuguese ship from West Africa to Cuba, in violation of European treaties against the Atlantic slave trade. Spanish plantation owners Don José Ruiz and Don Pedro Montes bought 53 captives in Havana, Cuba, including four children, and were transporting them on the ship to their plantations near Puerto Príncipe. The revolt began after the schooner's cook jokingly told the slaves that they were to be "killed, salted, and cooked." Sengbe Pieh unshackled himself and the others on the third day and started the revolt. They took control of the ship, killing the captain and the cook. Two Africans were also killed in the melee.
The history of slavery spans many cultures, nationalities, and religions from ancient times to the present day. Likewise, its victims have come from many different ethnicities and religious groups. The social, economic, and legal positions of slaves have differed vastly in different systems of slavery in different times and places.
Year of the Lash is a term used in Cuba in reference to 29 June 1844, when a firing squad in Havana executed accused leaders of the Conspiración de La Escalera, an alleged slave revolt and movement to abolish slavery in Cuba. The term "Year of the Lash" refers generally to the harsh response toward the would-be revolt by the Cuban colonial authorities, whereby thousands of Afro-Cubans were executed, imprisoned, or banished from the island. La Escalera alludes to the fact that slave suspects were bound to ladders and whipped with the lash when they were interrogated.
Slavery in Brazil began long before the first Portuguese settlement. Later, colonists were heavily dependent on indigenous labor during the initial phases of settlement to maintain the subsistence economy, and natives were often captured by expeditions of bandeirantes. The importation of African slaves began midway through the 16th century, but the enslavement of indigenous peoples continued well into the 17th and 18th centuries. Europeans and Chinese were also enslaved.
Slavery in Virginia began with the capture and enslavement of Native Americans during the early days of the English Colony of Virginia and through the late eighteenth century. They primarily worked in tobacco fields. Africans were first brought to colonial Virginia in 1619, when 20 Africans from present-day Angola arrived in Virginia aboard the ship The White Lion.
Slavery in Haiti began after the arrival of Christopher Columbus on the island in 1492 with the European colonists that followed from Portugal, Spain and France. The practice was devastating to the native population. Following the indigenous Tainos' near decimation from forced labor, disease and war, the Spanish, under initial advisement of the Catholic priest Bartolomé de las Casas and with the blessing of the Catholic church, began engaging in earnest during the 17th century in the forced labor of enslaved Africans. During the French colonial period, beginning in 1625, the economy of Saint-Domingue, was based on slavery; conditions on Saint-Domingue became notoriously bad even compared to chattel slavery conditions elsewhere.
Slavery in Latin America was an economic and social institution that existed in Latin America before the colonial era until its legal abolition in the newly independent states during the 19th century. However, it continued illegally in some regions into the 20th century. Slavery in Latin America began in the pre-colonial period when indigenous civilizations, including the Maya and Aztec, enslaved captives taken in war. After the conquest of Latin America by the Spanish and Portuguese, of the nearly 12 million slaves that were shipped across the Atlantic, over 4 million enslaved Africans were brought to Latin America. Roughly 3.5 million of those slaves were brought to Brazil.
Francisco de Arango y Parreño (1765–1837) was a Cuban planter and intellectual. He helped to oversee colonial Cuba's transformation into a major sugar and coffee producer in the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century.
Following Robert Cavelier de La Salle establishing the French claim to the territory and the introduction of the name Louisiana, the first settlements in the southernmost portion of Louisiana were developed at present-day Biloxi (1699), Mobile (1702), Natchitoches (1714), and New Orleans (1718). Slavery was then established by European colonists.
Carlota Lucumí, also known as La Negra Carlota was an African-born enslaved Cuban woman of Yoruba origin. Carlota, alongside fellow enslaved Lucumí Ferminia, was known as a leader of the slave rebellion at the Triunvirato plantation in Matanzas, Cuba during the Year of the Lash in 1843–1844. Together with Ferminia Lucumí, Carlota led the slave uprising of the sugar mill "Triunvirato" in the province of Matanzas, Cuba on November 5, 1843.