Afro-Cuban Costumbrismo: From Plantations to the Slums

Introduction: Nineteenth-Century Costumbrista Writers on the Slave Trade and on Black Traditions in Cuba

Introduction Nineteenth-Century Costumbrista Writers on the Slave Trade and on Black Traditions in Cuba Costumbrista essays, which are only the painting, objectively, whether to condemn or to exalt a whole epoch or a whole class. Azorín, “Comento a Larra” Manuel Moreno Fraginals established the period of 1518–1873 as that of the slave trade in Cuba (“Aportes” 13). April 1873 was the arrival date of the last documented shipment of piezas negras—Black pieces, as slaves were known in the dehumanizing slave-trade argot (Marrero 34). This was an illegal enterprise since the slave trade had been abolished in 1820. Throughout the nineteenth century, however, Africans arrived in Cuba in great numbers. Domingo del Monte, a distinguished Cuban abolitionist, estimated that of some 350,000 slaves working in Cuba in 1832, mainly on sugarcane plantations, only eighty thousand were born in Cuba (qtd. in Pérez de la Riva, Para la historia 118–19). After its legal abolition, the slave trade was still a large source of income in Cuba for the many individuals involved, including foreigners, usually Americans or Europeans. The Spanish historian Arturo Arnalte traced the highly organized system of illegal trade in his book Los últimos esclavos de Cuba (2001) [The last slaves in Cuba]. He used documentation of an 1854 disembarkation of some seven hundred African slaves, most of them children, with approval by both Spanish and Cuban public officials, as well as by slave traders and by sugarcane plantation owners. Slavery would become a trademark of the colonial experience in the Americas, in “the most gigantic process of coercive displacement of human beings known to history” (Moreno Fraginals, “Aportes” 13). Today, historians still debate about the numbers of slaves that went into Cuba, but they agree that the history of Cuban slavery could be divided into 2 · Afro-Cuban Costumbrismo: From Plantations to the Slums two large periods. The first began with the specific regulations that provided for the establishment of slavery in Cuba, and it extended until the early part of the nineteenth century, around 1820, a date related to British-Spanish treaties attempting to curtail the slave trade. The second period continued until the abolition of slavery in 1886. During the first three centuries some 390,000 slaves arrived, but in the nineteenth century numbers increased significantly to some 530,000 (Pérez de la Riva, Para la historia; Arredondo 29–30; Guanche 47). Cuban intellectuals during the nineteenth century, aware of the large numbers of Africans on the island, examined and commonly protested the negative influence of slaves and their descendents on the development of an emerging Cuban identity. The history of slavery in the Spanish-speaking colonies in the New World was carefully documented from its inception. As indicated in an initial Spanish royal license, of 1498, which allowed the importation of African slaves, the ideal prospective slave was seen in terms of a positive characteristic: “that they were born among Christians in order to help to convert Indians” (qtd. in Bachiller y Morales, Los negros 23). In Cuba, slavery, which had started with an official license dated 1513 (Serviat 11), developed a culture of its own, determined in part by the large number of slaves that entered the island throughout the nineteenth century. The traits of the perfect slave became a common theme in the many succeeding regulations. Representations of slavery in Cuba first appeared in colonial chronicles, in books tracing the history of slavery, and in city ordinances concerning restrictions of the activities of slaves and of freed Blacks. For slave owners there were also instructions, known as manuales—manuals about the physical treatment of and the maintenance of slaves. Within the Roman Catholic Church there would be many further texts on the issue of slavery (Závala 339–44). One example was Explicación de la doctrina cristiana acomodada a la capacidad de los negros bozales [Explanation of Christian doctrine adjusted to the capacity of Black bozales], a collection of instructional writings on the proper evangelization of the recently arrived slave, known as bozal, written in Cuba in 1797. The impact of African-based cultural and religious traditions in the development of a national identity, or Cubanía, was the subject of numerous debates. Throughout the nineteenth century, discussions placed slavery as inherent in a colonial status that made the island the wealthiest of Spain’s last possessions. Slavery was a booming business, which expanded into several economic enterprises , both national and international, all of which...