Contraband Slave Trade, Passing, and Race in Late Colonial Cuba

In the fifty years that followed the signing of the 1817 Anglo-Spanish treaty to suppress the slave trade, about half a million enslaved Africans were illegally brought to Cuba. While many aspects of the trade were clandestine, others can be more precisely described through the category of open secret. This paper analyzes how open secrets operated throughout the cycle of enslavement and racialization, from the moment of capture to those of death, manumission, or other forms of flight from slavery. It examines strategies used to move and immobilize illegally-held captives (fake papers, bribery, and euphemisms, among others), comparing them to the strategies of enslaved people and their descendants to ameliorate their circumstances (in particular, passing as free and passing as white). As nineteenth-century-Cuba’s greatest open secret, illegal slavery serves as a springboard to reflect on how coerced displacement, confinement, and racialization were experienced and contested by different people in ways that cannot be fully understood through the dichotomy of concealment and revelation. Illegal slavery, I argue, was often defined neither by secrets nor by their exposure; instead, the efficacy of fake documents, lies, flight, and impersonation relied on a willingness to pretend not to know, as exemplified by a variety of sources: correspondence by Cuban slave owners and British officials, memoirs by slave traders, court documents, and fictionalized accounts such as Cirilo Villaverde’s novel Cecilia Valdés (1882). Some of the questions that guide my analysis are the following: What was the relationship between passing and captivity after the banning of the slave trade? If plantation slavery and the Middle Passage shaped race, how did fifty years of massive and illegal slave trade transform it?