Uncommon Winds: Race, Passports, and the Legal Culture of Travel in Cuba

As histories of seafaring slaves and Haitian diplomacy have noted, various forms of transnational, or transimperial racial consciousness developed out of the interactions between people of African descent living in different parts of the circum-Caribbean in the nineteenth century.  That governments feared the political consequences of these interactions is well-known; the specific processes by which they attempted to regulate travel and mobility has received less attention.  This paper explores the Spanish colonial government’s attempts to control the movement of African-descended people to and from Cuba in the first half of the nineteenth century.  The 1812 Spanish constitution denied the rights of naturaleza (which included relaxed travel restrictions) to the empire’s African-descended subjects.  Although the constitution was never systematically promulgated, it set in motion intense debates about what legal identities, processes and documentation should govern the mobility of black and mulatto Cubans—and of African-descended travelers who sought to visit the island.  Government policy was frequently tested and shaped by the passport requests of free African-descended Cubans to travel outside of Cuba.  State intransigence met its ultimate test in the 1840s, when the imminent incorporation of Florida as a U.S. state prompted numerous requests from African-descended residents to resettle in Cuba.  This paper draws on archival research in Cuba, Spain, and the United States to reconstruct two interrelated processes: Afro-Cubans’ attempts to forge connections with other African Americans in the cirum-Caribbean and the aggressive state processes that sought to control mobility, and, consequently, the power to shape racial ideology.