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

In 1843 multiple slave revolts rocked the island of Cuba, including major uprisings near Matanzas and Santiago. Widely attributed to a vast conspiracy uniting slaves, free people of color, and a handful of whites, the revolts and alleged plot became collectively known as La Escalera ("the ladder"); the name was derived from a torturous slave punishment used to interrogate suspected subversives (pp. 55-57). Though historians have long debated the conspiracy's existence and the extent to which the 1843 revolts were linked, all agree that colonial authorities used both as grounds for the systematic disenfranchisement of Cuba's free people of color beginning in 1844, "the year of the lash."

As Reid-Vazquez demonstrates, the following quarter-century (1844-1868) was an exceptionally harsh period for free women and men of African descent in Cuba. In the immediate aftermath of La Escalera, nearly 40 free people of color were executed, and hundreds were imprisoned or banished. Additional repressive measures threatened Cuba's broader free colored population with increased surveillance, semi-coerced emigration, and occupational discrimination. Long-standing pardo and mulatto militias were dissolved, and new immigration policies aimed to reduce the colony's reliance on free black labor. Situating these developments within a "cycle of rebellion and repression" that stretched back several decades (pp. 44-47), Reid-Vazquez argues that despite intensified oppression, Cuba's free people of color displayed a "black agency" that "would never be fully subdued" (pp. 116 and elsewhere).

Though perhaps most indebted to the pioneering work of Pedro Deschamps Chapeaux, this study also represents a conscious effort to "bridge . . . existing scholarship on Cuban race relations that focuses on the opening and closing decades of the nineteenth century" (p. 175). The author's findings in many ways echo those of historians Kimberly Hanger, Jane Landers, Ben Vinson, Matt Childs, and others who have examined social networks, geographical mobility, and racial identities among free people of color in the colonial Spanish Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. Foregrounding the "anxieties" of creole elites and metropolitan officials, Reid-Vazquez also evokes the tenuous nature of colonial rule and mounting challenges to Cuba's slave regime, thus linking her work to scholarship on post-slave societies and racial ideologies at the dawn of the national period.

This study relies on newspapers, document collections, government papers, and materials drawn from several major archives, notably the Archivo Nacional de Cuba (Havana) and the Archivo Histórico Nacional (Madrid). The author's primary contribution is her analysis of hundreds of petitions housed in Cuba's national archive. In the mid-1840s, nearly 1,300 free people of color were either banished from Cuba, imprisoned overseas, or encouraged to emigrate (pp. 82, 203-272). From Spain and Mexico, "dozens" sent requests for permission to return (pp. 71, 85-88). Likewise, "foreign-born free people of color" facing expulsion petitioned to remain on the island (pp. 75-80), and free black undertakers, barbers, carpenters, and midwives requested exemption from racially based occupational restrictions (pp. 105, 108). During 1859 and 1860, almost 500 petitions were submitted by free people of color hoping to avoid compulsory militia service (pp. 135-140). The majority of these petitions were successful, though exiles in Spain and Mexico would not be allowed to return to Cuba until a general amnesty was proclaimed in 1857 (pp. 95-96).

Intriguingly, this study contains more than a few references to free people of color with surnames followed by African ethnonyms (Mandinga, Gangá, Lucumí, Carabalí, Congo). While Africa is largely absent from the nineteenth-century Atlantic World depicted here, and ostensible African identities are quickly subsumed within an interpretative framework that heavily emphasizes race, this reviewer wondered whether African-born former slaves were in some ways better prepared than other free black exiles to cope with "ten arduous years abroad...