Seeds of Insurrection: Domination and Resistance on Western Cuban Plantations, 1808-1848

Conclusion

Conclusion 127 was by far the most serious issue they had to deal with. Whites observed how slaves learned of the existence of laws that they could use to their own advantage—laws that entitled them to manumission and coartación. They also noticed that slaves, both african-born and creole, did not happily accept their captivity in the way their owners would have liked. In a sense, slave owners became captives of the slave system they had created. Throughoutmostof thetwentiethcentury,scholars—inparticularcubans— paid more attention to violent forms of slave resistance— namely, rebellions and marronage—than they did to day-to-day forms of resistance. However, as carolyn e. Fick pointed out some years ago, “If one attempts to quantitatively register the extent of resistance in any given slave society by merely counting the number of openly organized revolts,or the number or duration of large maroon communities such as the quilombos, then one risks looking in the wrong direction.”2 In this study, following Fick’s advice, I have done my best to look beyond revolts and marronage. Slaves resisted their bondage in a wide variety of ways, which were determined by the living conditions on their plantations and by their individual backgrounds. In cuba, as elsewhere in the americas, the environment of oppression on a given plantation often determined the extent of slave resistance. Harsh rules could lead to slave revolts,but they could also prevent their occurrence; yet,according to various prominent slave owners, relaxed organization could have the same results. It was a common belief among planters and overseers that the relaxation of control on coffee plantations was the reason that most of the slave uprisings of the first half of the nineteenth century took place there rather than at sugar mills, where control and working conditions were more strict.3 eventually, slaves developed alternative forms of resistance within the boundaries of the Spanish colonial system. The cases presented in chapters 5 and 6 of this work suggest the diverse range of actions undertaken by slaves to improve their existence or to retaliate against different types of oppression. They claimed some fundamental rights and pushed the limits of the legal system in a genuine process of negotiation. To some extent, this negotiation might be understood as accommodation. In order to make substantial changes in their lives, slaves who were not ready to rise against their owners and overseers instead played along with the rules of the insular slave system. The day-to-day social interactions among slaves, overseers, owners, and authorities fostered important relationships that offered slaves 128 Seeds of Insurrection the opportunity to instigate qualitative changes without losing their lives in the process. eugene Genovese stated some years ago that “accommodation itself breathed a critical spirit and disguised subversive actions, and often embraced its apparent opposite—resistance.” 4 understood in this way, legal actions taken by slaves—as well as their many disguised cultural and nonviolent acts—might be classified as incidents of both accommodation and resistance. Since these actions contributed “to the cohesion and strength of a social class threatened by disintegration and demoralization,”however, and since they frequently bordered on being violent actions, they are all considered as forms of resistance in this study. 5 chapters 5 and 6 showed us how nonviolent and disguised forms of resistance were part of quotidian life on western cuban plantations throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. The same can be argued for other places in the new World. as João José reis and eduardo Silva have pointed out in reference to Brazil, the vast majority of the slaves “either by strategy, creativity, or luck were living in the best possible ways.” 6 In his study of slave resistance in Puerto rico, luis Figueroa has similarly argued that“slaves also deployed adaptations that did not necessarily seek the short-term destruction of slavery’s social relations but provided time and space for autonomous existence and helped reaffirm their humanity in the face of the normative rules of chattel property imposed by slavery.” 7 Throughout this work it has been stressed that this “adaptive resistance” was also present in the daily life of african and creole slaves on cuban plantations .That is not to say, however, that cuban slaves did not take advantage of the system when possible, very often with the clear intention of undermining its basis and transforming it. In...