Cuba in the Nineteenth Century 

An Interdisciplinary Symposium at the University of Essex

 Thursday 5 May 2011

 Organised by
Matthias Röhrig-Assunçao (History)
Peter Hulme (LiFTS)

Abstracts

 Manuel Barcía Paz (Leeds)
Atlantic Revolutions: West African Islam in Cuba, 1804-1844
Over the past decades the impact of Atlantic ideas and ideologies in the Americas has become a constant subject of discussion. The ways to which the French and Haitian revolutions determined the actions of African slaves in the Americas has only been matched by the relevance given by scholars to the impact of British Abolitionist policies from 1807 onwards. While, at least for a period, a series of events that took place in Europe and the Americas did influence the choices presented to those who fought against enslavement and slavery, for most of the first half of the nineteenth century they were not by any means the only ones, or for that matter the most important historical events behind their acts of resistance. Islam, and in particular, the Fulani Jihād that altered the balance of power in the Western Sudan and, by extension, the parameters of the slave trade in the area, was just as important. Until today, the impact, and the very existence of Islam among West African slaves taken to Cuba has been all but ignored. In this paper I attempt to establish the connection between Islam in West Africa and Islam among West African slaves in nineteenth century Cuba. My key argument here is that the lives of those who were sent from these West African regions to the New World as slaves --especially many who left from the Bight of Benin and Upper Guinea-- continued to be signalled by their African experiences, including religious beliefs, including Islam.

Robin Blackburn (Essex)
Empire and Revolution in the 1870s: the Role of the Foreign Bondholders in Spain and Cuba
This paper looks at the upheavals in Spain and Cuba in the period 1868-75 and the role of London's Council of Foreign Bondholders in the Restoration of the Monarchy.

Camillia Cowling (Nottingham)
Across the Miles: Slavery, Mobility and the Law in Nineteenth-Century Cuba
This paper traces how the law and practice of nineteenth-century Cuban slavery was shaped by struggles over the mobility of the enslaved. Underpinning the condition of enslavement was the denial of human movement. Yet such denial was never absolute. Indeed, mobility was subject to constant, complex negotiations between the Spanish colonial state, slaveholders, and enslaved people. As African arrivals soared and fears of rebellion (itself often facilitated by mobility) grew, the colonial regime stepped up measures like the issuing of passes for slaves to owners to move their slaves or the policing of the countryside for fugitives. Owners’ responses were contradictory. They shared the need to prevent conspiracies, yet demanded authority to transfer their slaves from city to plantation as agricultural needs or personal whims dictated. They also relied on enslaved and free African-descended people to transport goods and information in ways that worried authorities. In the fissures opened up by such contradictions, the enslaved sought to wrest back control over their own geographical movements. Enslaved women and men were both geographically and legally more literate than historians have given them credit for. They fled plantations to make legal claims in cities, visited relatives across estates, and engaged in strategic flight when threatened with sale. Their fast movements across long distances imply they took advantages of the island’s famously fast-developing transport networks as well as of links of communication with free(d) people encountered along the way. The very pursuit of legal freedom was inseparable from the desire to determine where they and their families would live and work, avoiding the twin horrors of family separation and harsh field labour. From many perspectives, then, physical movement helped re-map the frontiers of legal bondage in nineteenth-century Cuba.

Catherine Davies (Nottingham)
Cienfuegos in the 1840s
Cienfuegos was a recently establish town in the 1840s, growing rapidly on account of the expanding sugar industry. Its military and civic governor from 1844 to 1848 was the progressive liberal Ramón Labra, a Spanish military officer who had fought in the Peninsular War against Napoleon and who was father of the future abolitionists Rafael María de Labra. Ramón Labra introduced numerous improvements to the town in an attempt to create a modern urban space and his statue still stands in the town´s central square. In 1848 he returned to Havana, apparently without explanation. The reason was that he was implicated in the first Narciso López conspiracy. This paper will consider Cienfuegos in the 1840s and further investigate the implications of this episode.

Peter Hulme (Essex)
The Glorious Route: Tracing Martí’s Last Journey
José Martí was the last of Cuba’s nineteenth-century heroes. He died in 1895 at the beginning of the war of independence against Spanish rule which ended in equivocal fashion with Spain’s defeat to the USA. Ever since his death Martí has been the dominant reference point in Cuban politics and culture. From early in the twentieth century there has been great interest in the route of his last journey through Cuba, from the beach at Las Playitas where he landed in early April 1898 to the small settlement of Dos Ríos, just outside Jiguaní, where he was killed in a skirmish with Spanish troops on 19 May. Interest increased with the publication of Martí’s Diario de campaña [War Diary], which offers a detailed account of that last journey. This paper looks at the two major efforts to retrace the route—by journalist Arturo R. de Carricarte (1880-1940), who persuaded the Cuban government to provide army support for a survey of Martí’s route in 1922, and by writer Froilán Escobar (b. 1944), who undertook the effort as part of his preparation for producing a critical edition of the Diario.

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (Vassar)
The Ciénaga de Zapata and the Foundations of José Martí’s Environmental Thought
In April of 1862, at the age of nine, José Martí spent nine months living with his father in Hanábana, in the Ciénaga de Zapata, part of the province of Matanzas, about 100 miles southeast of Havana. It was the longest period he would spend in the Cuban countryside he would describe so eloquently and feelingly in his writings. Matanzas was an important zone for sugar cane cultivation on the island and in the 1850s had a substantial slave population. Father and son, however, lived on the edge of the plantation zone, in the impoverished area surrounding the Ciénaga de Zapata, one of the most significant wetlands in the Caribbean region. It is still today a site of great ecological significance with close to a thousand autochthonous plant species, 175 species of birds, among them some that are endemic to Cuba, and thirty one species of reptiles, which includes the Cuban Crocodile (Crocodylus rhombifer). The wetlands provided a natural barrier to the expansion of sugar plantations and most of the inhabitants of Hanábana were primarily subsistence farmers, simple uneducated people among which young Martí would remain for nine unforgettable months. This paper traces the impact of these nine months on Martí’s approach to Cuba’s landscape and environment in his writings, especially on the development of a proto-environmentalist thought that linked sustainable development to Cuba’s independent future.

Michael Zeuske (Cologne)
The Amistad and the Amistad-Project: Cuba and the Hidden Atlantic in the Nineteenth Century
This paper presents new research on atlantization and the accumulation of (and for) Cuban slavery [Cuba grande] in times of the "second slavery". The paper concentrates on voyages of slave vessels from Cuba to Africa, focusing on the negreros (captains and slave traders), the mongos (slave factors in Africa) and the crews of the ships.