Shade-Grown Slavery: The Lives of Slaves on Coffee Plantations in Cuba by William C. Van Norman Jr. (review)

Unlike sugar and tobacco, coffee was not introduced in Cuba until the late years of the eighteenth century. Soon after its arrival, largely a result of the ongoing revolution in the neighboring French colony of Saint-Domingue, Cuban planters did their best to transform the new product into a viable commodity within the nascent and expanding slave plantation system that they were attempting to create.

Beginning in the mid-1790s, the Real Consulado asked its members to propose the best methods for growing coffee on the island. There were memoirs on the advantages and disadvantages of growing coffee, with some planters convinced that because of its high maintenance costs, coffee would never emulate sugar’s profit levels. As it happened, they were wrong, and at least for the first three or four decades of the nineteenth century, coffee plantations expanded across the island and rivaled sugar at times as the leading Cuban agricultural export.

Until now, Cuban historiography (both within the island and abroad) has produced a large number of studies focusing on the rise of sugar plantations and on the longevity of tobacco as a luxurious export. The works of Raúl Cepero Bonilla, Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Fe Iglesias, and Jean Stubbs, among others, are notable examples of the sophistication and depth of these studies. Unfortunately, coffee has never received the same sort of attention. As a matter of fact, since the foundational book El café, by Francisco Pérez de la Riva, little else has been published to explain the emergence and competitiveness of coffee in the early nineteenth century and its subsequent collapse. More significantly, even less is known about the social, economic, cultural, and religious living conditions that existed on these plantations.

This book by William C. Van Norman Jr. rectifies this historiographical amnesia. Divided into three main parts, each dealing with crucial aspects relating to the introduction of coffee in Cuba and to its day-to-day evolution, Shade Grown Slavery constitutes a much-needed addition to our body of historical literature about the development of Cuba into a plantation-based economic and social organism from the last decade of the eighteenth century.

Although Van Norman explores a plethora of issues, it soon becomes apparent that the slaves and their lives are at the very center of the book, just as the title suggests. Some of the arguments presented here are groundbreaking. For example, Van Norman pays close attention to the ethnic origin of the African and creole slaves and links them in a novel manner to their actions of passive and violent resistance. Specifically, he is keen to point out that the forms of resistance practiced by African and creole slaves were varied and were “informed by cultural calculations.” Van Norman thus offers a perceptibly a revisionist position that endeavors to recognize the agency of the slaves, distancing it from the often drummed up “winds of change” associated with the European and American revolutions of the period and asserting its relative independence.

Another of Van Norman’s important contributions is his powerful revision of slave rebellion on coffee plantations. Here he persuasively argues that coffee plantations constituted an “essential environment for African agency” (136). To Van Norman, the conditions of existence in coffee estates allowed the slaves to reproduce their identities and cultures in a way that was not often possible for those laboring on sugar plantations.

Particularly noteworthy is the fact that Van Norman does not shy away from challenging the image of the coffee plantation as an idyllic environment, characterized by its beauty and tranquility, that has been recorded and unfailingly passed down from generation to generation. By addressing this issue, he also subverts the myth that has traditionally presented sugarcane plantations as the most propitious place for slave revolts to take place because of the prevailing hard working conditions. Even though this myth was proven erroneous even during the first decades...