A Right to Travel in Cuba: The Documentary History of a Legal Non-System

The idea of a right to travel in colonial Cuba appears simultaneously in the archives as farce, aspiration, and foundational principle. However amorphous and inchoate, this idea’s circulation makes apparent a range of colonial practices that require us to dissociate travel rights from national citizenship. With a focus on the changing contours of individual documentation used to pass to and from Cuba in the nineteenth century, this paper will consider the right to travel as a shared fiction among colonial authorities and subjects. Decrees from Spain struggled to keep pace with steamship travel and to define when and why a passport was necessary. At the same time, migrations of illegally enslaved Africans and indentured Chinese left as light a paper trail as possible, with few rights guaranteed to Africans on intercepted ships. Yet the number of individuals seeking passports, and the number of passports issued, increased dramatically throughout the century, as did the interest on the part of local officials in documenting domicilio, residencia, and extranjería, and what rights or privileges came with them. The competing interests in “bureaucratic inscription” raise the question of whether it is possible to speak of a “system” of legal travel or a legal “system” more broadly. Where did contradictory, ad hoc laws and legal plurality intersect in defining who should be “documented” in their migrations and travels? Why speak of rights?