Seeds of Insurrection: Domination and Resistance on Western Cuban Plantations, 1808–1848 (review)

This book is part of a growing body of literature that explores the dynamics of slave resistance movements in Cuba. Unlike earlier monographs by Robert L. Paquette (1989) and Matt D. Childs (2006), which focus on specific events such as the Escalera conspiracy and Aponte’s rebellion, Manuel Barcia emphasizes the interdependence of several types of resistance during the early nineteenth century. The work blends familiar aspects of slavery and slave life with novel material collected primarily from the Cuban National Archives in Havana. Barcia devotes five core chapters to discussions of the various types of slave resistance, including homicides, conspiracies and revolts, marronage, suicides, legal challenges, and hidden forms of defiance. In essence, Barcia divides these forms of resistance into two larger categories: violent and nonviolent. Of the two larger categories, the latter, which includes discussions on African folklore relating to music, dance, and worldview, is perhaps the most innovative.

Indeed, the idea of Africa or African cultures looms large in Barcia’s study. Barcia argues that slave resistance in Cuba was directly connected to the memories and experiences of peoples in Africa prior to their arrival on the island. In many ways Barcia is answering John K. Thornton and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall (2007) in their plea for a restoration of the links between Africans in the Americas and their ethnic origins. By doing so, Barcia also engages the methodological model of creolization by Sidney Wilfred Mintz and Richard Price (1992), which proposes that the experience of the Atlantic slave trade hampered the regeneration of African cultural identities in the Americas. For Barcia, cosmologies, spiritual belief systems, and knowledge of war among Africans continued to play vital roles in the struggle against slavery long after their arrival in Cuba. Here, Barcia draws a distinction between the approaches to resistance among African slaves with those born on the island, arguing that the former were responsible for “most of the recorded acts of open insubordination, namely, revolts and the murder of their owners and other authority figures” (p. 31). Yet Barcia’s approach is rather nuanced and largely avoids the polarizing effects of some of the scholarship that addresses the Mintz and Price model. His conclusion that Lucumi, a Yoruba dialect, served as the lingua franca among various African ethnicities in Cuba is compatible with the Mintz and Price model, which stresses cultural creativity and blending in the Americas (p. 44).

In each chapter Barcia structures his analysis by expounding upon a series of vignettes carefully culled from the archives. While Barcia provides the reader with the now familiar trajectory of slave revolts, he also offers insights to some of the more precious details of ethnic ceremonial practices associated with these movements. For example, slaves sang the song Ho-Bé to unite members of a plantation. Prior to the revolt, they utilized war songs consisting of call and response known as the Oní-Oré and the O-Fé. Participants often wore colorful clothing. In one incident the leader wore a woman’s dress and hat. Others used costumes and amulets as symbols of power. In the aftermath of rebellion, Barcia explains that during interrogations slaves often emphasized their ethnic names, compelling prosecutors to address them by both their African and Christian names. For Barcia, slaves in Cuba were involved in a constant struggle against dominant groups while defending their individual and ethnic identities.

In his last substantive chapter, which is clearly influenced by the work of James C. Scott (1990), Barcia touches upon the less visible aspects and non-violent forms of slave resistance. Slaves pushed the limits of social control by participating in covert meetings with members of other plantations. Barcia explains, “At such clandestine meetings, slaves chatted, danced, sang, and remembered their beloved homelands” (p. 107). Other times they met in open defiance, against the orders of their owners or managers, leaving authorities seemingly powerless. In...