I am immensely grateful to Franco Barchiesi and Shona Jackson for reading earlier versions of this article. Their insightful and provocative questions have been an example of steadfast collegiality. Also, the scholarship of Gema Guevara, Nancy Mirabal, and Saidiya Hartman has been an inspiration. Santiago Cortes Cespedes provided much of the motivation for this article, and to Hernan E. Cortes, I owe a debt of gratitude for his brilliant approach to history, his enthusiasm, and his great conversations on the meaning of freedom.

1. Hartman, Sadiya, Lose your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Macmillan, 2008)Google Scholar.

2. Mirabal, Nancy, Suspect Freedoms: The Racial and Sexual Politics of Cubanidad in New York, 1823–1957 (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. Scott, Rebecca J., “Gradual Abolition and the Dynamics of Slave Emancipation in Cuba, 1868–1886,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 63 (1983): 449–477CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Nancy Mirabal, Suspect Freedoms, 35.

5. Mortet Law, Cuba 1870. Last accessed May 23, 2019. college.cengage.com/history/world/keen/latin_america/8e/assets/students/sources/pdfs/44moret_law.pdf.

6. William Seward, 39^th Congress Senate Report On the Supposed Kidnapping of Colored Persons in the Southern States for the Purpose of Selling them as Slaves in Cuba. 1^st Session. Washington D.C., 1866.

7. Rothman, Adam, Beyond Freedom's Reach (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2015), 187CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. Ibid.

9. Repartimiento, meaning “distribution” in Spanish, worked in conjunction with the encomienda system during the early colonial period.  Native population of the Americas were forcefully distributed and “assigned” to labor sites in Spanish colonial mines, farms, churches, and colonial public projects; repartimiento as a system populated the encomienda system with indigenous forced labor. The system of repartimiento evolved into a tribute-labor system in which the indigenous population was forced to work in order to give tribute to the Spanish crown. The repartimiento established labor conditions similar to slavery, however, for indigenous populations, being seen as “free” under Spanish law designated an in-between social status that was not freedom nor enslavement.

10. Shona N. Jackson, “Humanity Beyond the Regime of Labor: Antiblackness, Indigeneity, and the Legacies of Colonialism in the Caribbean.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, June 6, 2014, https://decolonization.wordpress.com/2014/06/06/humanity-beyond-the-regime-of-labor-antiblackness-indigeneity-and-the-legacies-of-colonialism-in-the-caribbean.

11. While indigenous conditions of bondage have been historically assessed as separate from that of African enslavement, and have been under-examined with the pretext that Africans represented the largest single group of enslaved workers, it is significant to consider that indigenous laborers constituted an important and unacknowledged sector of forced labor in Cuba, not only in the early colonial period but well into the end of the nineteenth and the dawn of the twentieth century.

12. Paul Conrad, “The Specter of Apache Runaways and the Afro-Indigenous Borderlands of Colonial Cuba.” Paper presented at Indigenous Borderlands of the Americans, San Marcos, Texas, April, 2018. The Apaches where among the various indigenous groups Spanish officials transported long before emancipation, brought to the island after 1783 as prisoners of war and were distributed to individual homes, plantations, hospitals, and public works projects (Conrad). Moreover, additional indigenous groups were quietly brought to the island as slave traders took advantage of the fact that abolition treaties that applied exclusively to the African slave trade had no bearing on the trafficking of indigenous peoples.  Indigenous peoples transported to Cuba to meet the need for labor included members of various groups: Yacatec Mayas, Nahuas, Calusa, Tequesta, Timucuas, Uchises, Apache, Navajo. Apache women in particular were valued as house servants and wet nurses.

13. Yaremko, Jason M., Indigenous Passages to Cuba, 1515–1900 (Florida, 2016), 130CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14. Ibid.

15. Throughout the Americas, indebtedness at the end of slavery defined agricultural life and labor. The establishment of the rural “plantation/company store” ensured that workers would remain bound to their agricultural bosses/worksite, that salaries would circulate back to the owners in the form of payments received by store, and that workers remained as dependent as possible to the plantation/farmer/company. The “plantation/company towns” developed in the shadow of the plantation/agricultural site.  Basic goods were scarce and when available at the “plantation store” and were overpriced. The cycle of indebtedness to the plantation store incentivized workers to place their children in the fields as early as possible in order to cover collective family debt.

16. Domínguez, Esteban Morales, Prevost, Gary, and Nimtz, August H., Race in Cuba: Essays on the Revolution and Racial Inequality (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

17. The complexity of Cuban society at the end of the nineteenth century was such that as slavery stood firm as an institution, Antonio Maceo, a free black man, was second in command of the Cuban rebel forces against Spanish colonialism. Maceo as a man of color actively opposed to slavery was allowed by the white rebels to enter the ranks of military leadership typically reserved for white slave-holding leaders.  He maneuvered among the white planter class, conditionally emancipating slaves, and those unwilling to emancipate their slaves unless guaranteed indemnification.  Maceo fought Spanish colonialism alongside leaders that extended an exceptionalism towards him that was nontransferable to those of the same racial categorization, which were legally held as slaves and servants.

18. del Carmen Barcia Zequeira, María, “La otra familia,” in Parientes, redes y descendencia de los esclavos en Cuba (Havana: Casa de las Americas, 2003)Google Scholar.

19. Guevara, Gema R., “Inexacting Whiteness: blanqueamiento as a Gender-specific Trope in the Nineteenth Century,” Cuban Studies 36 (2005): 105–128CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20. See the work of Gema Guevara (2005); Nancy Mirabal (2017); Cowling, Camillia, “Negotiating Freedom: Women of Colour and the Transition to Free Labour in Cuba, 1870–1886.” Slavery and Abolition 26, no. 3 (2005): 377–391CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mena, Luz, “Stretching the Limits of Gendered Spaces: Black and Mulatto Women in 1830s Havana,” Cuban Studies 36 (2005): 87–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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22. Martínez-Fernández, Luis, Key to the New World: A History of Early Colonial Cuba (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2018), 99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23. King, Stolen Childhood, 121.

24. Davis, Carole Boyce and Jardine, Monica, “Imperial Geographies and Caribbean Nationalism: At the Border between ‘A Dying Colonialism’ and US Hegemony,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (2003): 151–174CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25. Rebecca Scott has stated that among the notable historians that have analyzed aspects of the abolition of slavery in Cuba are Bonilla, Raúl Cepero, in Azúcar y abolición (Havana, 1948)Google Scholar; Corwin, Arthur, in Spain and the Abolition of Slavery in Cuba, 1817–1886 (Austin, 1967)Google Scholar; y Sánchez, Ramiro Guerra, in Guerra de los diez años, 1868–1878, 2 vols. (Havana, 1950-52)Google Scholar; Knight, Franklin, in Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century (Madison, 1970)Google Scholar; and Fraginals, Manuel Moreno, in El ingenio: complejo econónomico social cubano del azúcar, 3 vols. (Havana, 1978)Google Scholar.

26. The decree offered by de Céspedes provided a series of options in which owners could lend their slaves out to the service of the revolution without freeing them until the question of slavery could reach resolution after the war.  The enslaved could not run away to join the army without the consent of their masters, and Maroons, who had for centuries evaded slavery, were encouraged to turn themselves over and in this way gain their “legitimate freedom.”   Overall, both free people of color and the enslaved were incorporated into the insurgency and represented over half of all troops deployed.

27. Rolando, Gloria, Raices de mi corazón/Roots of My Heart, AfroCubaWeb.com (Cuba: 2012)Google Scholar, VHS/DVD.

28. Rebecca J. Scott, “Gradual Abolition and the Dynamics of Slave Emancipation in Cuba, 1868–1886,” 449–477.

29. According to Rebecca Scott (1983), a group of insurgents’ documents titled the Colección Fernández Duro is to be found in the Library of the Real Academia de Historia, Madrid (hereinafter RAH, FD). These provide evidence that libertos were treated as labor gangs rather than as free individuals. See, for example, the orders given by M. Quesada in June and July of 1869, in RAH, FD, leg. 4, docs. 432, 635, 713, and 720. On the use of libertas as domestics, see J. Agustin Bora to C. Prefecto del Partido Porcayo, Nov. 25, 1869, RAH, FD, leg. 2, carpeta 11, doc. 484.

30. Nancy Mirabal, Suspect Freedoms, 90.

31. By some accounts, just over sixty thousand children were, under the Moret Law, transitioned from slavery to eighteen years of indentured servitude. According to Rebecca Scott, between the enactment of the Moret Law in 1870 and the end of 1877, official figures showed 61,766 children brought into indentured service by virtue of having been born after 1868, and 21,032 slaves freed for being over age sixty, and 9,611 freed because they were not properly registered. For the results of the census taken in 1861–1862, see Cuba, Centro de Estadistica, Noticias estadisticas de la isla de Cuba en 1862 (Havana, 1864), and for 1877, see Fe Iglesias Garcia, “El censo cubano de 1877 y sus diferentes versiones,” Santiago (Santiago de Cuba), 34 (June 1979), 167–214. For official reports on the numbers freed, see Estado demostrativo de los esclavos …, Mar. 15, 1878, in Archivo Historico Nacional, Madrid (hereinafter AHN).

32. The law allowed for slaves to seek protection, however, such attempts required the enslave to seek legal assistance outside of the owners property. According to Scott, the successful appeals most often came from slaves that had connections or access to unique privileges, for example, literate urban domestic slaves—but not those who were illiterate and enslaved in rural plantations: Slaves that had already engaged in purchasing their freedom and which had  placed a down payment on their purchase price, tended to be better placed to seek protection. Scott details a representative case where an illiterate slave named Luisa appealed for her freedom, but her master intervened, sent her to the countryside to punish her and her brother, and then another literate slave belonging to a different master, appealed on Luisa's behalf, and won the case. This was a rare example of a slave benefitting from access to a literate slave able to assist. Only with access to someone literate, urban, brave, and willing to assist was Luisa able to counter her master's tactics.

33. Scott, “Gradual Abolition and the Dynamics of Slave Emancipation in Cuba, 1868–1886,” 449–477.

34. As per the example provided by Rebecca Scott, it seems to be the case in 1885, when world sugar prices had fallen sharply, and some Cuban ingenios (sugar mills) were going out of business, as per Scott's account, on the Ingenio Nueva Teresa, which had approximately 175 patrocinados, the records cite seventy-nine purchases of freedom in just a few years.  The plantation was paying an average of $334 pesos a month in stipends to its patrocinados, but, simultaneously was receiving an average of $225 pesos a month in payments from patrocinados purchasing freedom. According to Scott, deposits from patrocinados meant about 67 percent of the amount paid in Nueva Teresa in stipends to patrocinado during those years.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid.

37. Martínez-Fernández, Luis, “Life in a “Male City”: Native and Foreign Elite Women in Nineteenth-Century Havana,” Cuban Studies 25 (1995): 27–49Google Scholar.

38. Mena, Luz, “Stretching the Limits of Gendered Spaces: Black and Mulatto Women in 1830s Havana,” Cuban Studies 36 (2005): 87–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39. Luis Martínez-Fernández, Key to the New World, 102.

40. García, Juan Andreo and Gullón Abao, Alberto José, “Vida y muerte de la mulata”. Crónica ilustrada de la prostitución en la Cuba del XIX.” Anuario de estudios americanos 54 (1997): 140CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41. Ibid.

42. Patterson, Orlando, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1982)Google Scholar.

43. Gema Guevara, “Inexacting Whiteness: blanqueamiento as a Gender-specific Trope in the Nineteenth Century,” 105–128. And Gema Guevara, “Founding Discourses of Cuban Nationalism: La Patria, Blanqueamiento and La Raza De Color” (PhD diss., University of California, San Diego, 2000). As well as Nancy Mirabal, Suspect Freedoms, 121.

44. Arrechea, Carmen Montejo, “Minerva: A Magazine for Women (and Men) of Color,” in Between Race and Empire: African-Americans and Cubans before the Cuban Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

45. Nancy Mirabal, Suspect Freedoms, 121. By the turn of the twentieth century, Minerva, as a publication became less concerned with questions of race, gender, and freedom; instead, the publication shifted its mission toward black respectability. The second phase of the publication was less representative of the concerns of black Cuban women, and women of color were no longer the primary contributors.

46. García and Gullón Abao, “Vida y muerte de la Mulata,” 152.

47. Nancy Mirabal, Suspect Freedoms, 161–164.

48. Ibid.

49. Ibid.

50. Racial tensions escalated after the massacre of 1912. The Cuban Communist Party emerged as one of the few organizations that expressed a desire to end the exploitation of black Cubans in the workplace, although its white members did not envision Afro-Cubans as equals within the nation. Leaders advocated, instead, for the segregation and relocation of all blacks and mulattos to the province of Oriente and for the creation of two separate regions on the island, one with blacks and the other with white citizens, respectively.

51. De la Fuente, Alejandro, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

52. Nguyen, Mimi Thi, The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53. Shona Jackson, Humanity Beyond the Regime of Labor.