Voices of the Enslaved in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

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240 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 8 tables, notes, bibl., index

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8078-7194-2
Published: October 2011
E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-7875-5
Published: October 2011
E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-0-8078-7767-8
Published: October 2011

Latin America in Translation

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Putting the voices of the enslaved front and center, Gloria García Rodríguez's study presents a compelling overview of African slavery in Cuba and its relationship to the plantation system that was the economic center of the New World. A major essay by García, who has done decades of archival research on Cuban slavery, introduces the work, providing a history of the development, maintenance, and economy of the slave system in Cuba, which was abolished in 1886, later than in any country in the Americas except Brazil. The second part of the book features eighty previously unpublished primary documents selected by García that vividly illustrate the experiences of Cuba's African slaves. This translation offers English-language readers a substantial look into the very rich, and much underutilized, material on slavery in Cuban archives and is especially suitable for teaching about the African diaspora, comparative slavery, and Cuban studies. Highlighting both the repressiveness of slavery and the legal and social spaces opened to slaves to challenge that repression, this collection reveals the rarely documented voices of slaves, as well as the social and cultural milieu in which they lived.

About the Author

Gloria García Rodríguez, a historian, is a researcher at the Institute of History in Havana.
For more information about Gloria García Rodríguez, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"Should be required reading for both students and senior scholars who work on slavery in Cuba and the Caribbean. The book will be of great value as a text for undergraduate students."--The Historian

“A useful synthesis of the evolution of slavery in the Cuban economy.”--Latin American Research Review

“[Rodriguez] does a skillful job of pointing out that slavery was not imposed by physical violence alone.”--Latin American Research Review

"Pioneering. . . . García is not trying to give us an unmediated voice of the enslaved; she knows that is likely impossible. But she does succeed in laying before us a view of enslavement from within the confines of the plantation, in the process giving us a much fuller and richer picture of the interior world of Cuban slavery than any yet available."--Ada Ferrer, from the foreword

"This collection excels at restoring a strong agency to slaves who are sometimes viewed as faceless, supine, downtrodden, and incapable of responding to their servile conditions. Slaves did not just work, riot, and die violent, premature deaths. Garcia beautifully recovers the rich abilities, insights, and collective will of Cuba's slaves through their own words. An invaluable and thorough introduction to a new world slave system."--Franklin W. Knight, The Johns Hopkins University