Abolition of Slavery in Cuba

Seminar Questions

Why was slavery abolished in Cuba?
Who contributed (free people of colour? Creole elites? Women? The enslaved? Spanish abolitionists..?)
How did antislavery and anticolonial movements intersect (or clash)?
What were the intersections between Spanish colonial power and slavery? Was it possible to have one without the other?
Why does it matter how we tell the story of abolition in Cuba?

Seminar preparation:

1: please complete this short reflective survey - it should take you 10 mins - and send it to me at c.cowling@warwick.ac.uk

2. choose 1 reading from:

Scott, Rebecca. Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labour. Princeton University Press, 1985.

- Introduction
Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation and Revolution, 1868-1898(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999)
- “Introduction"
Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833-1874. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999.
- “Introduction”
- Chapter 5: “The Colonial Public Sphere: The Making of the Spanish Abolitionist Society,”100-125

Further readings:

Adriana Chira, Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race Beyond Cuba's Plantations, CUP 2022

Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886-1912. UNC, 1995

Scott, Rebecca, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba After Slavery, 2005

Scott, Rebecca J, "Reclaiming Gregoria's Mule: The Meanings of Freedom in the Arrimao and Caunao Valleys, Cienfuegos, Cuba 1880-1888,"Past and Present170 (2001): 181-216.

Karen Y Morrison, Cuba's Racial Crucible:The Sexual Economy of Social Identities, 1750-2000, Indiana University Press, 2015 (nineteenth/ early twentieth century chapters)

Cowling, Camillia Conceiving Freedom: Women of Colour, Gender and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro 2013

Aisha Finch and Fannie Rushing, eds. 2019 Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation: The Afro-Cuban Fight for Freedom and Equality, 1812-1912

Rubiera Castillo, Daisy, Reyita: The Life of a Black Cuban Woman in the Twentieth Century, Latin America Bureau, 2000

Alejandro de la Fuente A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba, UNC Press 2001

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Black in Latin America: Cuba: The Next Revolution [note: includes historical racist images and violence]

Prados-Torreira, Teresa. Mambisas: Rebel Women in Nineteenth-Century Cuba. University of Florida Press 2005.

Jose Marti, "My Race" [Mi raza], 1893, extract here A classic text by one of the founding thinkers of the anticolonial struggle, arguing for a Cuban national identity beyond race or former enslaved origins

Louis Perez, Jr.,Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos (UNC Press, 2008), chapter 3: "Metaphor as Paradigm". Shows how ideas about race, post-emancipation settings and empire helped forge a new North American imperialism in Cuba. [note: contains racist cartoons that demonstrate the thinking of the era.]

David Sartorius,"Cuban Counterpoint: Colonialism and Continuity in the Atlantic World," in New Countries: Capitalism, Revolutions, and Nations in the Americas, ed. John Tutino (Duke University Press 2016) Explores the tensions of Spanish notions of colonial citizenship, race, and slavery's continuity in C19 Cuba

The Idea of Race in Latin America: 1870-1940, eds. Richard Graham et.al (University of Texas Press, 1990) (esp Aline Helg chapter on Cuba)

Alejandra Bronfman, Measures of Equality: Social Science, Citizenship, and Race in Cuba, 1902-1940 (UNC Press, 2004) [note: contains racist images from the era]

Sartorius, David. Ever-Faithful: Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba. Duke University Press, 2013