Erecting an Urban Barracón: Sugar Warehouses, Space, and Spatial Control in Matanzas, 1818–86

In 1860 American photographer George Norton Barnard photographed two men at work in the San Juan river warehouses, in the Cuban city of Matanzas. Seen from a spatial perspective, the warehouses embodied Cuban sugar planters’ power in at least two ways. First, by employing a majority of enslaved men born in Africa well in the 1870s the warehouses expressed the planters’ contempt for the alleged prohibition of the slave trade in the Spanish Empire. Second, they epitomized the planters’ goal of erecting tightly regimented carceral facilities controlling the life, the residence, and the social interactions of the warehouses’ enslaved workers. This made them a sort of urban slave barracks or barracón – analogous to those of sugar plantations. The danger to avoid was that the enslaved could organize to subvert slavery, thus endangering the planters’ power, and that they might articulate their interests with other sectors of Cuban society. Hence the need to keep them away from the streets and locked up at night in rooms normally located above street level. In addition to expressing sacarochratic power vis-à-vis the entire city, then, the warehouses also spoke of the type of social control the sugar elite sought to exert.