My Vassals: Free-Colored Militias in Cuba and the Ends of Spanish Empire

Decades of scholarship on the history of African-descended people in colonial Latin America have shown that militia service was a durable marker of status and collective identity. The free black and mulatto colonial subjects who belonged to militia regiments won the respect of their families, their communities, their military and political superiors, and certainly their historians. By bearing arms, occupying public spaces, defending the colonies, undertaking expeditions, and earning officer status, milicianos sometimes challenged—and sometimes affirmed—the prevailing racial ideologies of their day. In the process, they could enjoy access to land, credit, and tax and legal exemptions that distinguished them from other African-descended subjects by privileges and paper trails. That their stories can be reconstructed today is itself a testament to their ability to leave their mark on the documentary record.²

What motivated colonial authorities to sanction the militias in the first place has merited less scholarly attention, perhaps because there seems to be less diversity in militia policies than in their practice. But two rationales emerge from among the many case studies of free-colored militia service. The first, and most obvious, was territorial defense. The uneven distribution of colonial military resources created gaps that free-colored militias filled, particularly in frontier areas and during moments of crisis. In some locales, such as Saint Domingue, the government simply could not entice enough white colonists into military service.³ In many others, officials saw free African-descended soldiers as especially qualified to locate and capture runaway slaves. The irony of arming a potentially restive subordinate population was never lost on colonial officials, and this fueled a second motivation for maintaining the militias. By incorporating prominent free African-descended people into service for the state, administrators sought to guarantee their loyalty to colonial rule. In former maroon communities in colonial Mexico, for example, militia privileges constituted “an attempt at co-opting these former runaways into becoming obliging citizens in colonial society.”⁴ And in many contexts, militiamen assented to these appeals for loyalty, proclaiming their adherence to the monarch and even grounding their demands to be further included as subjects of the empire in a language of allegiance to colonial rule.⁵

For most of the colonial period, Cuba’s milicias de color conform to the patterns of militia service found elsewhere in Latin America. Since 1600, pardo (mulatto) and moreno (black) militias defended the island from attacks from pirates and invasion from rival European forces in the Caribbean. Militia members and their superiors in Cuba and Spain regularly expressed mutual and reciprocal interests in a common colonial project. Captain Juan Moreno, who led the community of royal slaves at El Cobre, petitioned a local judge for land and subsistence rights in 1677 based on the slaves’ defense of eastern Cuba: “when the occasion comes up,” he noted, “we never fail with ardent zeal what our superiors have ordered us,” and he pledged a “desire for greater opportunities in the royal service.”⁶ In 1714, Philip V praised the blacks and mulattoes in the Cuban militias, “considering them as my vassals (vasallos míos),” and he declared that they “should be given the good treatment they deserve.”⁷ In the wake of the British occupation of Havana in 1762–63, during which the militias won recognition for their valor in combat, two-thirds of free colored heads of household in Havana served as militia members.⁸ As Allan Kuethe notes, the various forms of military service available to black and mulatto Cubans “appealed to colonial pretensions to nobility.”⁹

By the nineteenth century, however, old formulas that motivated free people of color and the colonial state were faltering. Militia service had never fully guaranteed loyalty, but turmoil in mainland Latin America and in Europe made the allegiance of colonial subjects more critical than ever to Spain. Conspiracies led in 1811 by José Antonio Aponte, once a first corporal in the Batallón de Milicias Disciplinadas de Pardos y Morenos, and in 1839 by León Monzón, a captain in the Batallón de Morenos Leales de La Habana, sent an...