Shade-Grown Slavery: The Lives of Slaves on Coffee Plantations in Cuba

Introduction: The Crop Mattered

1 Introduction The Crop Mattered Over 70 percent of coffee exports were shipped from Havana in 1827. It is apparent that as many slaves were employed on coffee farms as were in sugar and that coffee cultivation was as dependent upon slave labor as the sugar sector. The number of slaves utilized on each coffee farm could be as great as on sugar plantations. —Laird W. Bergad, Fe Iglesias García, and María del Carmen Barcia I t was during the summer of 1998, as I was working through hundreds of records from plantations in the provincial archive in Matanzas, Cuba, that I became increasingly aware of large numbers of documents from coffee plantations in the region.1 Not long after that realization, I was reading The­ Cuban Slave Market, 1790–1880 when I encountered the above quote. It was these pieces, along with the lack of studies on coffee plantations and the slaves who worked on them, that led me on the long process of research and writing that resulted in this work. Throughout, I have been motivated to restore the story of those thousands of slaves to the history of Cuba and to expand our understanding of plantation life on the island. Historians and others have told the story of slavery on sugar plantations in numerous studies and other works over the last 150 years while virtually ignoring or minimizing other types of slavery on the island and other economic activities that contributed to the growth of the colony. They have often let slavery on sugar plantations stand for slavery of all types. The retelling of the story of slavery on coffee plantations in Cuba begins against that background. Coffee and sugar as plantation crops grew up together. It was not clear in the first decades of the process that sugar would rise to the preeminence it achieved in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Sugar would come to dominate not only the economic life of Cuba but also the historical narrative. But Cuba was always much more than just a sugar island. Coffee plantations were major contributors in expanding the frontier, populating the island, and broadening the colony’s economic base. The cafetal (coffee plantation) loomed large in the Cuban imagination, shaping ideas of prosperity, beauty, and order. Slaves on the cafetales had a distinctive experience compared to those on other types of farms. Material conditions mattered, as they shaped experiences. Coffee slaves, like all slaves on plantations, lived a life of enslavement and hardship. But their daily lives were filtered through a particular work 2 Shade-Grown Slavery regime, agricultural cycle, and living arrangements that affected demography and mortality, thereby facilitating social and cultural variations. To be sure, there were similarities across types of enslavement on the island, but there were also differences rooted in the crops and conditions. For tens of thousands of slaves, those distinctions mattered. Each chapter of this study explores different aspects of the coffee plantation and the lives of the slaves who worked on the farms. The text is divided into three parts, with the first section devoted to the rise of the coffee plantation complex and the historical context of the coffee boom during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The second section is devoted to the experiences of the slaves on the cafetales, drawing out the implications of the foundations laid in the first section. Part III is the final section, with concluding remarks and some thoughts on the longer-term implications of the coffee plantation experience. The first chapter begins by looking at how the slave population and the plantation complex expanded rapidly. It looks at how slaves provided the labor to fuel the construction of the vast plantation complex that characterized the nineteenth century on the island. It also establishes a periodization of the coffee plantation era and shows how slaves built the plantations that would populate the countryside outside Havana for dozens of kilometers in every direction. Chapter 1 thereby establishes a framework, showing the trajectory of plantation and demographic growth that situates the subsequent chapters. Chapter 2 looks back to the decades before the beginning of the plantation boom years to explore the groundwork that enabled the decades of sustained growth that followed. This chapter argues that the plantation boom was not caused by the Haitian Revolution; rather, the expansion of plantation agriculture was already well underway by 1791 and was facilitated by a decades-long process of structural changes negotiated between...