Defending the Empire with Slaves: Spain’s Military Employment of Slaves in Cuba, 1763–96

This paper focuses on the employment of enslaved workers in military occupations in both defensive and offensive warfare during the conflicts that engulfed the Caribbean in the second half of the eighteenth century.  The argument is that Spain regularly armed and employed slaves in Cuba as part of imperial military strategy and as such, they were more than an “ad hoc resource of last resort.” The Spanish empire had a long history of employing slaves as soldiers, military auxiliaries, and laborers in battle and defense construction projects.  But Caribbean warfare in the second half of the eighteenth century confronted the Spanish empire with unprecedented challenges leading to an extraordinary resort to both state enslavement and to the military employment of slaves between 1763 and 1796.  The city of Havana was a hub of Spain’s Caribbean military campaigns in three crucial periods of revolutionary warfare – the siege and occupation of Havana by the British from 1762 to 1763 and its immediate aftermath, Spain’s intervention in the North American War for Independence from 1779 to 1783, and its disastrous intervention in revolutionary warfare in Hispaniola between 1793 and 1796.  In some of these conflicts slaves were called to serve in the heat of battle and often rewarded for their service. After the occupation of Havana by the British in 1763, however, Spanish officials also established a more permanent corps of artillery workers with certain privileges and status who became a “formal military tool” to defend the city.  The Spanish crown’s use of slaves as part of these campaigns shows an evolving reliance on the labor and skills of enslaved people to defend its Caribbean colonies. For others fighting to defend the empire in battle could bring privileges, rewards, and occasionally freedom.