Changing History: Afro-Cuban Cabildos and Societies of Color in the Nineteenth Century (review)

This monograph is a welcome addition to nineteenth-century Cuban history, making an excellent connection between the two major award-winning monographs on Cuban history: Rebecca J Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1899 (1985); and Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–1912 (1995). This book is also a valuable contribution to the recent emerging field of historical and anthropological studies on comparative slavery, emancipation, and race relations, and the African diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean; and African American history in a broad framework.

Howard maintains: “The struggles for freedom and equality of Africans and their descendants in nineteenth-century Cuba are the essential concerns of this study” (xiii). For this purpose, the author chose the topic of Afro-Cubans’ unique mutual-aid associations which prevailed in the cities, such as the capital city of Havana, and located such Black associations at the center of his arguments Unlike the case of two other major slave societies of the Americas, i.e. Brazil and the Antebellum South, Cuba did not become a slave society until the mid-eighteenth century. With the continuing massive influx of new arrivals from Africa, the proportion of African-born population in Cuba grew very quickly and the Cuban population became predominantly enslaved and foreign-born. Being forcefully transplanted in the New World as human commodities, these enslaved people of African birth formed their cabildos de naciones to adjust themselves culturally and psychologically.

The book has been divided into eight chapters. Chapter 1, discussing the formation of the colonial slave society during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, serves as a good foundation for the author’ arguments on race, class, and identity in the following chapters. Chapter 2, based on the author’s reading of abundant secondary literature, discusses the African roots of the cabildos de naciones and emphasizes their uniqueness by distinguishing them from the prevailing Catholic lay sodalities named cofradías. This chapter helps us understand fully ethnic diversity among the African-born slave population and historical processes by which ethnicity was recreated and ethnic solidarity was created as “Africanness” under New World slave systems. Chapter 3 examines the diverse roles and functions of Afro-Cuban cabildos as mutual-aid associations, which covered both their spiritual/religious and socioeconomic needs of their members. Chapters 4–8 elaborate several historical stages as the Afro-Cuban population began to actively engage themselves in their own empowerment Chapter 4 covers the initial awakening for political empowerment led by some prominent ethnic cabildo leaders. The subject of chapter 5 is Afro-Cubans’ involvement in the independence movement, through their mutual-aid organizations, during the 1860s and 1870s. The last four chapters (5–8) reveal how, in the declining agro-export society, the Afro-Cuban population, recognizing their needs for emancipating and their right for political equality in Cuban society, reorganized and strengthened their mutual-aid associations by uniting themselves politically as Afro-Cubans. By discussing the Afro-Cuban mutual-aid associations in the nineteenth century and emphasizing Afro-Cubans as active participants in “changing history,” Howard successfully demonstrates the creolization of ethnic identities as African into a collective racial identity as Afro-Cuban, although he does not present the issues of identity as his major focus in this book.

There are a few reservations to note. First, this book easily gives its readership the impression that only the urban Afro-Cuban population got involved in their political struggles for freedom Were their social movements exclusively urban? The majority of persons of African descent in Cuba remained enslaved agricultural workers on the booming plantations in the countryside, and the author certainly mentions in the Introduction that planters encouraged them to form their own cabildos for the sake of slave control. Yet we cannot see the roles of the rural slave population in the Afro-Cuban political struggles; one may...