Roads of Enslavement in Mid-19th-Century Cuba

In 1836, Luciana, an enslaved criolla woman, was sold from a sugar plantation in Havana province to road-building work on the capital city’s outskirts. Luciana’s story of forced movement, and of the coerced building of the infrastructure that underpinned movement itself, - encapsulated many of the bitter, transformational struggles occurring over human mobilities as Cuba’s plantation economy expanded. Her journeys followed the geographic imaginary of Cuban and Spanish elites, who pondered the familiar maritime connections of this largest of Caribbean islands but also eagerly turned their gaze deep into the hinterland. Here, rich soils promised fabulous wealth, if only their produce could be transported to the ports and cities. A year after Luciana’s sale, Latin America’s first rail line connected Havana to the rural town of Bejucal; thenceforth, railway fever absorbed most public attention. Yet much of the movement of humans, animals, and goods continued to occur on the oft-maligned roads. Traced across island maps, their spidery lines remained stubbornly silent about the shattered lives and frequent deaths of enslaved roadworkers like those Luciana encountered. The stones these people laid were trudged along by enslaved carters and muleteers, doing the muddy, dangerous business of transport. The shackled steps of others, undergoing sale and forced transport, traversed them too. Meanwhile, Luciana - like many other enslaved people - had also employed precarious but significant mobilities via the roads, forging social connections and amassing savings. The paper argues that – even as enslavers and colonial officials forged a newly gendered and racialised politics of forced movement - enslaved people used island infrastructures for creative forms of mobility and made “place” on their own terms - not simply as the backdrop for wider struggles about slavery and freedom, but an inherent part of such struggles themselves.