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.