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

Introduction

2 Seeds of Insurrection cultures. They made use of the privacy offered by their huts and barracks, of the lack of surveillance in the cane and coffee fields, and the anonymity of the roads, taverns, and shops to voice their ideas and opinions with an acceptable degree of safety. The western lands of cuba, brimming with coffee and sugar estates, were no exception. colonial authorities and slave masters often permitted the slaves their spaces of culture and expression as safety valves in the interest of maintaining social stability. alterations in the precarious balance between slaves and masters could lead to violent acts of slave resistance. In this book, I consider the different forms of resistance practiced by african-born slaves and their descendants under Spanish rule in cuba,using as my primary sources the numerous cases of slave resistance recorded by the Spanish colonial authorities. although this is not the first work to assess the varieties of slave resistance in the americas, it is the first to do so for the specific case of nineteenth-century cuba. This book is also the first to consider the origins of the slaves in cuba as an integral part of the story of their resistance. In doing so, I reveal that slaves were neither simply spectators to the events that surrounded them nor happy participants in their own oppression . Instead, they resisted domination in its countless forms by negotiating , by reproducing their cultures, by openly revolting, by running away to the forests and mountains, and by taking their own lives. More importantly, slaves resisted domination in ways that accorded with their personal life experiences. For those born in africa, the process of resettlement was a cultural shock that involved learning a new language, new social practices, and a new life as a slave. as chapter 2 demonstrates, most of the slave revolts of the nineteenth century had african-born leaders who pursued what eugene Genovese has called “restorationist aims.”1 The creole descendants of the first generations of african slaves, in contrast, more frequently had recourse to Spanish colonial laws that conceded rights to those slaves who were able to realize that they were entitled to enjoy them. 2 This is not to say that creole slaves did not revolt or that african-born slaves did not take advantage of the law. But the attitudes and forms of resistance of creole and african-born slaves differed. creoles had lived their entire lives in direct contact with Spanish cuban culture. Most of them learned both the language of their ancestors and Spanish. They were children of the land in which they lived, and consequently they knew its secrets. Introduction 3 african-born slaves, in contrast, never relinquished their african heritage. They carried with them their memories, their cosmologies and religious beliefs , their jokes and songs, their knowledge of war and politics, their codes of honor, and many other beliefs and values that defined who they were and how they viewed the world. as John K.Thornton has pointed out,“Whatever the brutalities of the Middle Passage or slave life, it was not going to cause the african-born to forget their mother language or change their ideas about beauty in design or music; nor would it cause them to abandon the ideological underpinnings of religion or ethics—not on the arrival in america, not ever in their lives.”3 Approaches to Slave Resistance in the Americas new World slave regimes and the forms of resistance developed to fight them have been a matter of academic interest since the late nineteenth century . Yet scholars became more engaged with these subjects only in the first quarter of the twentieth century. This period was dominated by the myth of the happy and docile slave who was easily integrated into his or her new environment. renowned scholars reproduced ancient racist assertions about the inferiority of blacks and especially about their criminality-prone personalities . 4 Some authors, including Fernando Ortiz, ulrich Bonnell Phillips, and Gilberto Freyre, characterized slaves as inferior people who believed in and practiced various types of witchcraft. Public opinion gave credibility to these viewpoints, which reflected the influence that the racial conflicts of the early twentieth century in the u.S. South and cuba exercised on scholars.5 It was only after 1940 that the scholarship of slavery and slave resistance began to change.Two studies played an important role in inspiring the reassessment...