The Year of the Lash: Free People of Color in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World by Michele Reid-Vazquez (review)

In 1844 an unprecedented wave of violence engulfed the island of Cuba. “The Year of the Lash,” as it came to be known, was one of the darkest moments in the history of Atlantic slavery. In March, May, and November 1843, a series of slave revolts had broken out across the island. Accusations were raised of an alliance of free people of color, enslaved men and women, creole dissidents, and British abolitionists. In order to “root out” the conspiracy, Captain General Leopoldo O’Donnell launched a brutal campaign of torture and repression. The conspiracy of “La Escalera,” as it was called, took its name from the ladder to which officials tied and whipped the accused until they confessed. More than four thousand individuals were arrested. Like all American slave societies, nineteenth-century Cuba was built upon systematized violence, but this spectacle of arrests, tortured confessions, and public executions represented a new departure. The former British consul in Cuba, David Turnbull, was convicted in absentia, and many free people of color, enslaved Africans, and white creoles were executed. It was free people of color, however, who were identified as the movement’s ringleaders. Among those sentenced to death were some of the most prominent artisans, property owners, and militia officers within their community. The most famous was the accused mastermind Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés, alias Plácido, a free mulato and one of Cuba’s most renowned poets. Free people of color constituted almost half of all those condemned to death, and many hundreds of their numbers went into exile, banishment, or imprisonment abroad in the aftermath of the Year of the Lash.

Numerous studies have dealt with this infamous incident in Cuban history, including Robert L. Paquette’s Sugar Is Made with Blood, Pedro Deschamps Chapeaux’s El negro en la economía habanera del siglo XIX, and Aisha Finch’s 2007 dissertation and new book, Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba. Michele Reid-Vazquez distinguishes her own account by focusing not on the event itself but on the repression that followed it. Her book covers the period from 1844 to 1868, which marked the outbreak of the Ten Years’ War, the first stage of Cuba’s independence wars with Spain. During that time, in response to the events of 1844, Spanish colonial authorities in Cuba coerced hundreds of free people of color into voluntary exile, prohibited all free blacks from disembarking in local ports, and banned native-born men and women of color from select areas of employment. They also disbanded the militias of free people of color, once a source of pride, belonging, and social advancement to that community. New measures were introduced that sought to license free individuals of color and regulate their movements. Additionally, new policies promoting “white immigration” (which included Chinese coolies and forced Mayan laborers from the Yucatán) aimed to dilute their demographic presence on the island.

Drawing on archives in Cuba, Mexico, Spain, and the United States, Reid-Vazquez reconstructs not only the repression but also free people of color’s active resistance, through legal and extralegal means, to the restrictions placed upon their citizenship in Cuba and the loss of their property and livelihood. Expanding her story beyond the island of Cuba, Reid-Vazquez follows individuals into banishment and exile in Mexico and the United States. She highlights the many petitions free people of color submitted to return to Cuba from exile and their (often surprisingly successful) contestation of new professional restrictions that aimed to marginalize and replace them in Cuba’s society and economy. She also describes their struggles against a new military draft introduced in 1854, when the black and mulato militias were reinstated.

By framing her story within this longer chronology and focusing on free people of color’s active contestation of their...