Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba After Slavery (review)

In her most recent work, Rebecca J. Scott takes on the daunting task of mapping "the construction of post-emancipation society" (5) in nineteenth century Louisiana and Cuba. Focusing principally on New Orleans and neighboring southwestern parishes in Louisiana, and on Cienfuegos and Santa Clara province in central Cuba, Degrees of Freedom emphasizes the constant exchange of people and ideas between the two regions. Freedpeople in both areas waged common struggles to define freedom wrested from brutal sugar-producing slave economies amid the chaos of war. But, for Scott, the divergences in the regions' histories are what compel her attention. By 1900, white elites in Louisiana had riveted together a white supremacist regime based on the political and civil exclusion of freedpeople, whereas ex-slaves in Cuba enjoyed a broad equality of rights and remained a central part of the nation's self-conception.

Scott details, as she later does for Cuba, how Louisiana sugar workers fashioned a radical, militant, and inclusive politics. Drawing on the heritage of collective labor organization in the fields and on ties with black bourgeois activists in New Orleans, Louisiana freedpeople reached across class and racial lines in their attempts to form a democratic movement. The persistence of racial labor segmentation and racial antagonism doomed their efforts, as did white paramilitary violence after the 1870s, and a state and federal judiciary willing to sustain segregation and disfranchisement laws. Black Louisianans unwillingly retrenched until they faced "an interlocking structure that virtually excluded people of color from the public sphere" (256-57) and internally fractured their community. Even military service in the 1898 occupation of Cuba yielded nothing for African Americans but racialized marginalization, both in military operations abroad, and in national acquiescence to white supremacy at home.

Unlike Louisiana, Cuban sugar workers were racially heterogeneous and lacked traditions of segregated work, allowing them to assume central roles in the politics and the national identity of Cuba. Cuban nationalist ideology viewed slavery as the legacy of a degrading colonialism, and proclaimed universal rights and civil equality for all Cubans. Enslaved black Cubans solidified their position in the public sphere of the nation by taking up arms alongside, and in many cases, commanding European and Asian comrades. Ties of loyalty forged during the war with black officers translated into post-war influence in loyalty, labor, and cross-racial alliances that precluded social marginalization—as the U.S. military discovered when it attempted to impose racial qualifications to vote during its occupation. Even brutal state repression of political movements and labor unions had to grapple with the inclusivism of Cuban nationalism. "Even racists," observes Scott, "staked their claims . . . on the grounds of transracial patriotism" (252).

While the particulars of the histories of Louisiana and Cuba recounted by Scott will not surprise scholars of either region, Scott's incisive and engaging work in juxtaposition yields real benefits to the historian as to the cross-disciplinary reader. Theorizing takes a back seat to narrative in Degrees of Freedom, but the book has much to say about state formation, race, and the public sphere as it does the relation of informal and personal struggles to formal politics. In Scott's account, the emergence of racialized socioeconomic and state systems was a multi-causal, close-fought, and contingent process. Even in the gathering gloom of defeat auguring the segregation era in the United States, for Scott, there was no sense in which the future was foreordained; what everyday actors did mattered as intensely to the unfolding future in both Cuba and Louisiana as the historical constraints they inherited.