Negros Fugitivos: Black Mobility in 18th-Century Cuba and the Caribbean

This paper traces hundreds of journeys of free and enslaved men, women, and children into and out of eighteenth-century Cuba, under their own power. It asks, how did Africans and African-descended peoples construct their own geographies of freedom and escape during an era of ascendant intercolonial war making and slave trading? Drawing upon archival research in Spain, Cuba, Jamaica, and Britain, the paper considers cases of individuals who either alone or in small groups crossed from one island or empire to another, by land or by sea, in journeys of their own making of escape and return. By taking these cases collectively, it seeks to connect with a growing literature, in the tradition of Julius S. Scott’s The Common Wind, that explores black mobility and networks of communication beyond the paradigmatic slave ship. By mapping these journeys into and out of Cuba, Jamaica, the Bahamas, the Moskito Coast, and Saint Domingue, the paper proposes an alternative geographic understanding of the Greater Antilles and the links between them. It also forms part of a larger project that seeks to redraw interimperial, maritime circuits of communication and migration across the Greater Caribbean region. In so doing, this paper argues for the need to rethink our imagined geographies of African diaspora and the role of individuals in shaping them.