Fighting Slavery in the Caribbean: The Life and Times of a British Family in Nineteenth-Century Havana

Cuba began the second half of the nineteenth century chafing under Spanish rule and as the prize target of British abolitionists and U.S. annexationists, for it remained one of the world’s wealthiest colonies and most conspicuous slave societies. Annual sugar production was approaching 1.5 million metric tons. Per capita income in the western districts that made up the island’s plantation heartland probably exceeded the comparable figures at that time for the United States and Great Britain. The demand for enslaved Africans was rising once again, and before the end of the 1850s annual imports would surpass 20,000 tons, despite Spanish signatures on antislave trade treaties and persistent efforts by the British government to ensure compliance. Sugar and slaves made the booming port of Havana one of the most expensive—and fascinating—cities in the hemisphere in which to live.

In this readable, richly illustrated little book, published as part of a series designed to look at Latin American history from unconventional angles, Luis Martínez-Fernández uses the visitation of an obscure British official, subsequently murdered by Cuban assailants, as the central thread with which he deftly interweaves the sights, smells, and social life of Old Havana. Martínez-Fernández uncovered in the Special Collections Library of Duke University the papers and diaries of George Backhouse, a youthful employee of the Foreign Office who was sent to Havana in 1853 to serve as a judge on a special court created decades before to handle cases that involved vessels seized for alleged violations of Anglo-Spanish antislave trade treaties. Backhouse arrived with his pregnant wife Grace, their infant child Alice, and a bundle of cultural predispositions that was quickly punched and prodded by his hosts. Although the judgeship came with a threefold increase in salary, Backhouse found his resources strained in paying for rent, domestic help, and the imported material comforts required of a Victorian gentleman. He frequently overpaid Cuban vendors because he refused to engage in the higgling and haggling they expected. Shopping sprees in Havana’s well-stocked markets, however, helped to alleviate homesickness. While George had trouble managing the money, Grace had trouble managing the hired help, a train of persons of color who had their own notions of cleanliness and godliness. At street level, Havana had a cosmopolitan character, but residential patterns tended to be segregated. George would eventually live outside Havana’s walls in a German-English enclave whose social cadence was set by the wife of the British consul. As members of the Church of England, the Backhouses had no formal house of worship in Cuba, and they were utterly appalled by the festive behavior of Cubans on the Sabbath. George, although no flaming abolitionist, seems to have developed no close friendships with any member of the Cuban elite, and his tempestuous relations with an English clerk named James Dalrymple stemmed in part from the latter’s overabsorption, after many years in Cuba, of creole folkways.

Grace Backhouse, like her husband, kept a diary while in Cuba, and one of the book’s more interesting chapters portrays what “Life in a ‘Male City’” would have been like for elite white women. Grace spent much time at home reading, writing, and ordering servants about. Women who walked the streets were pejoratively labeled, so travel to shops and friends necessitated a carriage, which, for the elite, was elaborately constructed to effuse status and withstand gaping potholes. Grace could be excused for regarding her Cuban visit as incarcerating.

She returned to England, leaving her husband behind. She would never see him alive again. In August 1855, he was dining at home when two persons of color broke in, and in an apparent attempt at robbery, George was stabbed to death. Cuban authorities never solved the crime, and Martínez-Fernández speculates that the disgruntled James Dalrymple may have been involved. The ending is one of the several surprises in this rewarding story, which should find its way into undergraduate courses in Latin American history as a supplementary text.