The Politics of Owning: Family, Property, and Slave Ownership among Women of Color in Santiago de Cuba, 1828–68

During the Cuban War of Independence (1868-1898), insurgents from the province of Santiago de Cuba, mostly Afro-descendants, proposed radical visions of “racial fraternity,” which became entrenched as national ideology after decolonization. This paper argues that Santiago’s status as a backwater within the Spanish Empire had allowed creative political and economic experiments that went against hegemonic plantation logics to take root here. Before the war, Santiago had traditionally figured in official correspondence as an archetypical example of “failed” imperial governance and social disorder because of collapsing plantations, dense cross-class and cross-color kin lines, and a relatively large number of free people of color. This paper examines changing patterns of ownership and family formation among Afro-descendants, as a background for a vibrant popular political culture that was key to the later independence and anti-slavery mobilization. Specifically, the paper will focus on changing patterns of slave ownership among free people of color between 1828 and 1868, showing how such ownership complicated established racial hierarchies in this region. Owning slaves provided free women of color, in particular, with the opportunity to exercise greater autonomy and to establish expansive patronage-based social networks that, oftentimes, blurred the distinction between family and property. By the 1860s, such networks became politically charged and retooled toward anti-slavery goals. The paper will draw on judicial cases, testaments, and freedom papers from the Cuban National Archives and from the Santiago Provincial Archive.