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4 The Costumbristas’ Views of Manly Black Males Uppity Blacks and Thugs Blacks on the island of Cuba are our poetry, and one must not think otherwise , but not just the Blacks, but Blacks with Whites, all mingled, and to form then the pictures, the scenes, which have to be infernal and diabolic, but exact and evident. Félix Tanco Bosmeniel, qtd. in Salvador Bueno, El negro en la novela hispanoamericana Slavery is unsustainable from the point of view of all aspects of morality, reason and law, and, consequently, nobody of upright conscience can defend it. Antonio de las Barras y Prado, La Habana a mediados del siglo XIX: Memorias de Antonio de las Barras y Prado By the eighteenth century freed Blacks and mulattoes controlled most of the manual trades in Cuba (Castellanos, 1:85). The rules of coartación, the self-purchasing of one’s freedom, historian José Luciano Franco stated, provided slaves the opportunity to enter in large numbers into the work force in Cuban cities (La diáspora 198; Knight, “Slave” 114). José Ferrer de Couto, in his Los negros en sus diversos estados y condiciones, tales como son, como se suponen que son, y como deben ser [Blacks in their diverse stages and conditions, as they are, how they are supposed to be, and how they must be] (1864), indicated that male slaves often hired themselves out as drivers of coaches, as workers on piers and in custom houses, as stevedores, or as errand runners, available to anyone without the means to own a slave. These activities were so profitable that “anybody who has practiced them for two or three years and is still not free, has not wanted to be free until then because of more attractive objectives” (qtd. in Ortiz, Los negros esclavos 289). Many of those who gained their liberty, known as coartados, Ferrer de Couto continued, also raised enough money to buy a Costumbristas’ Views of Manly Black Males: Uppity Blacks and Thugs · 121 dwelling, “afterward without much work required; which they almost always obtain” (qtd. in Ortiz 289). The booming economic activities of Cuban cities, said Ferrer de Couto, provided plenty of opportunities to gain one’s liberty: “Those who practice productive jobs and industries, such as tailors, shoemakers , tobacco growers, and others similar, who are numerous, and those who dedicate themselves to music and manage to learn to play an instrument, also acquire maximum ease in becoming free” (qtd. in Ortiz 289). The Spaniard Antonio de las Barras y Prado in his memoirs, La Habana a mediados del siglo XIX [Mid-nineteenth-century Havana], remembering his experiences in Cuba as an office clerk for a Spanish-owned grocery store, claimed that in the mid-nineteenth century one-third of the Cuban population was constituted of gente de color [colored people]. His definition of that group encompassed “Blacks and people of mixed race who abound on the Island. . . . They are free, slaves or freed, and in these conditions they live at the service of Whites, in all kinds of tasks, domestic, agricultural and industrial” (107). These lucrative occupations provided the funds necessary for coartación, sometimes within two to three years (Franco, La diáspora 198). The process of coartación, according to de las Barras y Prado, was relatively easy, including the possibility of payment in installments of fifty pesos on a monthly basis until a previously agreed upon price had been reached (110). The Spaniard José María de Andueza, describing his arrival in Cuba in 1825, in his Isla de Cuba pintoresca [The picturesque island of Cuba] (1841), had a similar view of the impact of the Black community on the city of Havana. His impression of the city’s population was that of an “immense town of Whites and Blacks” (40). His first experience upon arriving in Havana was in the active market scene at the pier of San Francisco, where Black vendors dominated: I trod then upon the wharf of the capital of Cuba, that Pier of San Francisco , so long, so heated, so crowded with barrels of flour, of casks of wine, of boxes of sugar, the latter destined for loading, the first and the second for consumption in the city. It was truly a new world that drew my eyes, with its endless noise of carts and wheelbarrows, that came and went without interruption; it was a continued jubilation of sea chants in different languages; it was a heartfelt prayer sung in unison...

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