This paper explores the nineteenth-century Cuban practice of
captura. This referred to the physical catching and incarcerating of allegedly enslaved persons, accused of flight or other unauthorised movements, but also to the lengthy, bureaucratic processes whereby alleged owners were charged fees in order to recoup them.
Captura brought the colonial officials who oversaw it into constant conflict with individual slaveholders, who, while they supported the policing of enslaved mobility in theory, resisted its implications in practice. Slaveholders contested the legal definitions of
cimarrones (runaways) - arguing that the captured person had merely been moving as part of their work - and accused officials of acting out of
interés (financial self-interest). Their arguments staked out their claims, not just to human property, but to
moveable property. Their ability to act as “slave-movers” – people with the power to coerce others into movement – underpinned their identity as slaveholders. Disputes over the control of enslaved people’s movements thus became discussions about the function and limits of the colonial state during slavery’s nineteenth-century apogee.
Records about captura suggest a rich range of enslaved experiences of movement beyond the purview of colonial administrators. They indicate enslaved people’s attempts to influence disputes about their movements - whether these were framed in transactional, bureaucratic language or in racialized assessments about their degree of “suspiciousness.” Yet captura cases also suggest porous boundaries between coerced movements - such the dangerous, difficult work of transport, frequently performed by slaves - and notionally autonomous mobility. Both kinds of movement emerge as precarious, frightening undertakings, carrying the constant threat of violent capture and incarceration. Captura also had an important gendered function, focusing particularly on men, whose labour was more lucrative and who were viewed as more “suspicious,” but exposing women who were captured to particular threats of violence from male strangers.
