All the panelists explore the relationships between human movement and the local and transnational flows of ideas in this period of geographic transformations and re-imaginings of Cuban spaces. Historians are familiar with the particular slipperiness of documentary sources that - in the context of the “open secret” of the illegal trade - were often literally works of fiction, constructing written “evidence” of ownership of people who were legally free. While movement and mobility have often rightly been seen as important ways in which enslaved people might disrupt claims of ownership of their bodies or construct “rival geographies,” the movement of humans - passes and passports, bills of sale, identity documents – was also used in order to tighten the bonds of those who moved. This context shaped ways of thinking and writing about race, gender, freedom, and bondage, along with the re-mapping of Cuban spaces and re-imagining of them from inside and outside of the island, making the tools of literary scholars particularly valuable. Víctor Goldgel Carballo’s paper, “Contraband slave trade, passing, and race in late colonial Cuba,” draws on historical and literary sources to explore fake documents, flight, lies, and impersonation in the context of the fictions generated by the illegal trade. Daylet Domínguez explores the cartographies and geopolitical constructs of proslavery writers, politicians and journalists writing in, and on, Cuba and the US South, who began to imagine connections between these “second slavery” spaces that transcended colonial and national frontiers. Camillia Cowling’s paper explores how daily negotiations over the practice of captura – the capturing and charging of fees for alleged escaped slaves – helped shape definitions and uses of enslaved mobility and coerced movement, and, in turn, colonial politics more broadly during slavery’s apogee. David Sartorius approaches the question of the oft-presumed “modernity” of nineteenth-century travel writing by exploring such writings on Cuba alongside the documentary “paper trails” left by the movement of enslaved Africans to, and around, the island. Discussion of the papers will be facilitated through comments offered by Dan Rood, a historian of slavery, race, technology and capitalism in Cuba and the Greater Caribbean.