Envisioning Cuba

La Escalera and the Insurgencies of 1841-1844

Aisha K. Finch

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781469622354
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Latinoamérica y el Caribe

Envisioning La Escalera--an underground rebel movement largely composed of Africans living on farms and plantations in rural western Cuba--in the larger context of the long emancipation struggle in Cuba, Aisha Finch demonstrates how organized slave resistance became critical to the unraveling not only of slavery but also of colonial systems of power during the nineteenth century. While the discovery of La Escalera unleashed a reign of terror by the Spanish colonial powers in which hundreds of enslaved people were tortured, tried, and executed, Finch revises historiographical conceptions of the movement as a fiction conveniently invented by the Spanish government in order to target anticolonial activities. Connecting the political agitation stirred up by free people of color in the urban centers to the slave rebellions that rocked the countryside, Finch shows how the rural plantation was connected to a much larger conspiratorial world outside the agrarian sector. While acknowledging the role of foreign abolitionists and white creoles in the broader history of emancipation, Finch teases apart the organization, leadership, and effectiveness of the black insurgents in midcentury dissident mobilizations that emerged across western Cuba, presenting compelling evidence that black women played a particularly critical role.

Chapter One: Africans in Colonial Matanzas

On June 7, 1844, Eloisa Carabalí found herself in front of local military authorities being questioned about a most “criminal and horrifying conspiracy.” Eloisa was recorded as being a woman of mature age, a Roman Apostolic Catholic, a member of the Carabalí nation, and a widow. Her Carabalí name suggests that she boarded a slave ship somewhere along the Biafran coast, perhaps at Old Calabar. By 1844 Eloisa was working as a field laborer on the Buena Suerte sugar mill “in the service of her owner,” Miguel Cárdenas. From what we know of Buena Suerte, Eloisa lived and worked among people whose origins ranged from Igboland to Senegambia, scores of their descendants who were born in Cuba, and the free people she learned to identify as negros, chinos, or mulatos, according to the local racial taxonomy.

The story of how this woman from the Biafran coastal region became Eloisa Carabalí, worker of cane at Buena Suerte, tells the story of Cuba’s emergence as a thriving sugar colony. By the time Eloisa was arrested in the spring of 1844, Cuba was undergoing massive changes—new growth, new technologies, new levels of slave labor—all of which were making the island increasingly central to the principal markets of the Atlantic world. The financing, construction, and first harvest of the Buena Suerte mill ultimately pulled Eloisa to the Biafran coast and placed her in the hold of a slave ship. Eloisa’s journey across the Atlantic to a rugged and rather remote part of Matanzas was one of many that marked the seismic shifts in labor, land, and capital taking place in nineteenth-century Cuba. The life that she encountered there was but a smaller node in a much larger story of slavery and empire. The following chapter will explore the collision of Atlantic world forces that brought Eloisa and many other Africans to the island, and the political shifts within Cuba that entangled her in a “horrifying” conspiracy.

During the early years of the nineteenth century, a revolution was taking place in Cuba.¹ By the 1840s that revolution had matured, become smug, and settled in to enjoy the peak of its glory. Sugar had officially become king, and by midcentury it was producing dizzying heights of wealth. From this place on a saccharine throne, Cuba was hailed as the “bright jewel in the Spanish diadem,” as visitors marveled at the prosperity that seemed to smile on Cuba without end.²

For years beginning in the late 1700s, Cuban creole planters had petitioned the Spanish government to remove restrictive tariffs and open up the slave trade.³ Realizing this was the only way to compete with the region’s major sugar leviathans, the Bourbon throne finally responded with a series of legislative reforms in the late 1780s and 1790s.⁴ With a new tax structure in place, its ports opened up to new trading partners, and the unprecedented possibility of obtaining slaves from foreign merchants, Cuba’s planter elite was poised to usher in a massive increase in production that would have far-reaching consequences.⁵

Alongside economic liberalization and the expansion of the slave trade, a series of other events paved the way for this metamorphosis to occur. In 1791 slave insurgents in Saint-Domingue launched a revolution that eventually created the state of Haiti—the second independent nation and first black republic in the Americas. In 1807 Britain outlawed the transatlantic slave trade and in 1834 it formally abolished slavery in all its territories. The fall of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) and the demise of slavery in British colonies such as Jamaica and Barbados created a void in the region’s powerhouses that Cuban planters rushed to fill. As the nineteenth century progressed, the triumphs of the Industrial Revolution and the mechanization of sugar production further stimulated the island’s growing sugar industry. By midcentury that industry accounted for millions of dollars in revenue.

This yearly sugar crop was unapologetic in its demands—ever more land, hefty financial investments, and massive quantities of labor. More than anything else sugar needed bodies, and as many of them as possible. This demand brought hundreds of thousands of people from a vast stretch of West and Central Africa to the shores of Cuba. By 1844 the saying Con sangre se hace azúcar⁶ was no figurative phrase; it had become an instruction manual for how black limbs, psychic memories, and entire empires were transformed into over 170,000 metric tons of sugar per year—numbers which overseers quoted with pride, and foreign travelers reported with awe.⁷

The 1841 census was a telling indicator of how important the institution of chattel slavery had become to Cuba’s economic and political landscape. By 1841 the enslaved population of Cuba totaled 425,521.⁸ As many historians have noted, this census marked the first time in the island’s history that the population of color surpassed the white population. In many ways it functioned as a wake-up call for white elites, as the specter of Haiti’s Revolution loomed in front of them for much of the nineteenth century.

Across the rural landscape of Matanzas, slaves constituted not only the majority of the population but also, in most districts, the overwhelming majority. Two of the districts that became sites for the region’s most catastrophic slave rebellions recorded 75 percent and 76 percent of their populations as enslaved in 1841.⁹ The impact in the rural districts of such massive numbers of slaves—most of whom had been born in Africa—cannot be underestimated. This steady shift during the early years of the nineteenth century has been described by some historians as the “Africanization scare.” On the rural plantations it was easy for white people to think of themselves as surrounded by a sea of blacks everywhere they looked.¹⁰

During the years bookending Britain’s abolition of the slave trade—from 1801 to 1810—54,167 Africans were forcibly brought to Cuba. That number had increased by nearly 40,000 since 1781, when the number of imports set a new record. During the 1820s the number of slaves nearly tripled, to 136,381. In the decade leading up to 1840, the number increased further, to 186,179.¹¹ All told, between 1801 and 1850 Cuba received approximately 547,000 slaves, more than any other port, nation, or colony in the nineteenth-century Americas, save Brazil.¹²

The 1807 prohibition of the slave trade marked a turning point in Cuba’s North Atlantic integration.¹³ The aftermath of the ban effectively removed Britain, France, and the United States from the slave trade and created a vacuum that allowed Cuba and Brazil unprecedented access to merchants along the African coast. By the 1830s the entire slave trade had essentially shifted its energy south of the equator, and the implications of this new access for Cuba were profound.¹⁴ As historians Laird Bergad, Fe Iglesias García, and María del Carmen Barcia have shown, the price of slaves remained largely stable until the early 1850s, and this meant that African labor remained abundant and affordable for Cuban planters for decades after the trade was banned by other nations.¹⁵

The men and women who were taken to Cuba represented a huge swath of West and Central Africa, stretching from the Upper Guinea coast down to present-day Nigeria; further down the coast to the region of Angola; and even around the Cape of Good Hope to Mozambique.¹⁶ From 1806 to 1845, the largest African ethnic groups in Cuba were the Congos, the Carabalís, the Gangás, and the Lucumís. These groups were taken respectively from West-Central Africa, the Bight of Biafra, Sierra Leone, and the Bight of Benin. While scholars have differed on which of these groups dominated numerically during the period in question, the most recent estimates indicate that the largest numbers vacillated between the Congos and the Carabalís—a fact that often surprises students of Cuban history because of the strong cultural influence of the Lucumís. It is also critical to bear in mind, however, that these regions fluctuated in the number of slaves they sent to Cuba over the course of the century.¹⁷ And while collectively smaller in number, four other ethnic groups also constituted a critical presence on the rural plantations: the Mandingas, the Ararás, the Minas, and the Macúas. In the records of the rebellions, the names of the naciones involved reveal participation from many of these disparate origins, hinting at the way the crucible of Atlantic slavery forged new alliances among diverse people against the common enemy of slavery and its masters.

Some of the most recent insights about these demographic statistics are attributable to the historians Manuel Barcia Paz and Oscar Grandío Moráguez, and to the researchers of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.¹⁸ The development of this database has critically enhanced, if not revolutionized, the study of the slave trade in Cuba and throughout the Atlantic world and a growing body of literature has emerged to address both its merits and its methodological problems.¹⁹ Among other things, this database underscores the difficulties of assessing the largest ethnic groups in Cuba and elsewhere. With figures like these, it is extremely difficult to tally the number of people coming from each ethnic group with absolute precision.²⁰ What can be said with confidence is that the African cultures that grew up in rural Cuba represented a vast amalgamation of ethnic and cultural groupings from West and Central Africa.

Those Africans destined for sale in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies were generally assigned an ethnic “nation name” thought to correspond to their port of embarkation. Monikers such as Lucumí or Gangá denoted an enslaved person’s presumed African ethnicity and were known as their casta or nación names. The pitfalls of interpreting enslaved people’s ethnic identities through these nombres de nación are well known to scholars of the African Diaspora, and several historians have highlighted the problems inherent in these ethnic ascriptions and cautioned against interpreting them literally.²¹ For each ethnic designation a broad range of linguistic systems, cultural practices, and political traditions were folded facilely into such names as “Congo” or “Mandinga.”²² Moreover, the region where a slave was initially captured did not necessarily correspond to the place where he or she was forced onto a slaver, and the place where the ship embarked could easily be quite far from home.²³ Researchers have overwhelmingly shown that these nation names should be understood primarily as geographic identifiers; that is, as indications of where on the African coast the captives embarked, rather than precise indicators of ethnic, linguistic, or cultural backgrounds.

In nineteenth-century Cuba the largest number of slaves arrived from West-Central Africa, partly because this area was more difficult for the British antislavery squadrons to police after 1807.²⁴ The region that historians have designated “West-Central Africa” encompasses a longer stretch of coastline than any other slaving area and therefore includes an overwhelming number of ethnolinguistic groups and political entities. West-Central Africa is generally understood to begin at Cape Lopez in Gabon and extend through the present-day Congo and down to the southernmost tip of Angola. Because of the historical significance of the latter two areas, many have referred to the entire region as “Kongo-Angola.” In previous centuries, the Kingdom of Kongo had dominated economic and political affairs, but by the eighteenth century the kingdom had disintegrated, leaving no strong, centralized polity during the height of the Cuban slave trade. This meant that the West-Central African trade was carried out primarily by mercenary forces that targeted individual people and villages.²⁵ Scholars generally concur that Kikongo speakers, or those who understood Kikongo, constituted the majority of captives sent to Cuba. While Kikongo essentially functioned as a regional lingua franca, and therefore says little about the specific ethnic groups involved, the peoples who became collectively known as the Bakongo figured prominently in the slave trade.²⁶

The Bight of Biafra produced some of the largest numbers of slaves in the entire transatlantic trade, particularly to Cuba. As a whole, the Bight of Biafra covers nearly 370 miles of the western coast, extending from the Nun branch of the Niger River to Cape Lopez in Gabon. While most Biafran captives were taken from the Niger and Cross River Deltas, the region also encompasses large portions of contemporary Nigeria and Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon, and several of the islands off the coast.²⁷ Slaves from this region came to be known as the “Carabalís” because they were largely sent through the ports of New Calabar (also known as “Elem Kalabar”), Old Calabar, and Bonny. But Carabalí was also a sweeping term that encompassed a variety of ethnic and linguistic groups from the Biafran hinterland. The best-documented of these groups were the Igbos, the Ibibios, and to a slightly lesser extent the Efiks.²⁸

The Bight of Benin also sent thousands of slaves during the nineteenth century, particularly during the 1840s.²⁹ The Bight of Benin extends for about 400 miles from the Cape St. Paul in Ghana to the Nun River outlet in Nigeria. The “Lucumís,” as they became known in Cuba, were the main group taken from this region. The vast majority of them came from Yoruba territory through the ports of Ouidah and especially Lagos.³⁰ Until the close of the eighteenth century, the Oyo Empire was the political center of Yorubaland and the most powerful state in the region. Its collapse—beginning in the late 1790s, but greatly accelerated by the Fulani-Hausa jihadic invasion of 1835—pushed thousands of political prisoners and refugees into the Atlantic trade.³¹ The term Lucumí therefore encompasses Yoruba speakers who identified strongly with metropolitan Oyo; Yoruba speakers from the outer town...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba La Escalera and the Insurgencies of 1841–1844
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Africans in Colonial Matanzas
• Chapter Two: Rural Slave Networks and Insurgent Geographies
• Chapter Three: The 1843 Rebellions in Matanzas
• Chapter Four: To Raise a Rebellion in Matanzas
• Chapter Five: And the Women Also Knew
• Chapter Six: The Anatomy of a Rural Movement
• Chapter Seven: African Cuban Sacred Traditions and the Making of an Insurgency
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index