Black in a Toxic City: Life Expectancy and the Bacterial Geography of Plantation-Era Matanzas, Cuba

The historiography of slavery and the Black Atlantic has often emphasized the higher levels of Black autonomy in port cities due to more flexible forms of slavery and to the presence of large free Black communities. In this paper, I analyze the dismal indicators of life expectancy in plantation-era Matanzas (Cuba) for Africans and Afro-Cubans, which often presented a lower life expectancy for free Afro-Cubans than for their enslaved counterparts. Caused by factors such as gender, spatial distribution in the city, and access to medical practitioners, life expectancy rates clearly delineate a bacterial geography that determined the lives of most Afro-Cubans in the city. When put to dialogue with the literature of Atlantic post cities, this case study emphasizes that such cities could be highly toxic places for Africans and Afro-descendants, thus offsetting the alleged improvements in autonomy and occupational profile.