The Social Transformation of Eighteenth-Century Cuba (review)

Sherry Johnson addresses the impact of the reformed army upon Cuban society during the latter third of the eighteenth century and then projects the long-term significance of this experience well into the nineteenth. Her central focus is on the 1790s, and in particular, the administration of governor Luis de Las Casas, where Johnson assumes a strongly revisionist position. Researched in the appropriate archives of Spain and Cuba and in various repositories in the United States, her book contains a wealth of new information about colonial Cuba during a period when the island experienced sweeping transformations following the defeat at Havana in the Seven Years' War.

In my own study of the Cuban army, I focused upon the military reorganization, its political implications, and the army's interplay with the habanero planter elite and the libre estate. Johnson goes beyond this framework to assess the impact of the army upon society: as the origin of a very substantial immigration into the island, as an important source of income into the local economies, and as a privileged order, through its fuero,wherein the holder answered to military justice. While previous studies on this period have generally emphasized the "sugarocracy" and its slaves, Johnson addresses the mass of the white population and the substantial free population of color, which assumed an important share of militia responsibility.

Through royal legislation enacted in 1766, the crown opened the gate to the retirement and resettlement of military veterans in Cuba. This step, designed to provide depth for the island's defenses, opened the way for an impressive growth of the white population and was accompanied by military pensions and privileges earned through years of service to the king. Johnson traces the fate of this population, bringing into view fascinating insights into late-eighteenth-century Cuban society. Often able to acquire small parcels of land, military veterans added to the population of smallholders that ringed urban Havana. Aspiring to administrative positions, retired officers established high visibility as the rural capitanes de partido that in effect governed the countryside. This immigration resulted from retirements both out of the fixed garrison of Cuba and from Spanish rotating units that were deployed in Cuba or simply passed through Havana; these retiring veterans permitted the white population to hold its own despite increasing slave importations. Engaged in multiple agricultural pursuits, which included food production for Havana and the army as well as tobacco farming, these inhabitants—along with others who settled in the inland sections of the island—imposed an economic diversity that, Johnson asserts, was of primary importance in shaping the character of late-eighteenth-century Cuba. This perspective reaffirms the argument that monoculture did not dominate the island's economy until well into the nineteenth century.

Particularly enlightening is Johnson's work on marriage practices. Cuban families found Spanish officers and retired soldiers to be attractive mates for their daughters. Based on an extensive reading of parish records, Johnson calculates that over one-third of the marriages among Havana's white society involved Spanish men, a surprising figure indeed. In treating this subject, she explores the legal mechanisms governing such unions and their dowries, especially as defined by military law. Given the very high percentage of the population—both from Havana and from the inland jurisdictions—that served either as enlistees in the regular army or as militia volunteers, and who thus possessed the fuero militar along with their families, Johnson concludes that late-eighteenth-century Cuban society became truly "militarized."

This transformed Cuban society faced a crisis of profound proportions during the closing decade of the century, as the crown's efforts to reign in military spending coincided with unfortunate leadership at the colonial level. Johnson argues persuasively that Luis de Las Casas and Francisco de Arango y Parreño "were not as beloved by their...