This panel explores the experiences of violence, negotiation and resistance of enslaved and free Africans and African Americans in Cuba during the nineteenth century and its relation to colonial and imperial institutions. Presenting four distinct stories of the ways in which Black men, women and children, collectively and individually, navigated their relationship with the state, this panel emphasises the complex nature, adaptability and agency of their responses. Starting in 1836, Jesús Sanjurjo (University of Cambridge) interrogates the role of Black soldiers in Manuel Lorenzo’s uprising in Santiago de Cuba and its place in the wider history of revolutions of the Atlantic World. Ultimately, it aims to understand the motivations, fears and aspirations of the people of Santiago during this failed revolution and interrogate the intersection of Blackness, radical politics, slavery and self-emancipation during this extraordinary episode. Like Sanjurjo, Randy Sparks (Tulane University) also examines Black agency but in their appeal for freedom through the courts. Black sailors, liberated Africans, and after the 1833 emancipation of slaves in the British empire, the former slaves on British islands in the Caribbean became targets of slave traders in Cuba who attempted to (re)enslaved them. Some of them claimed to be British subjects in an effort to gain their freedom and had their cases tried in the courts, negotiated through diplomatic channels, and sometimes fought militarily. Those newly enslaved persons did not simply accept this legal sleight of hand, and they searched for ways to undo their enslavement, sometimes through the efforts of the British consuls. Enslaved Africans and African Americans around the Atlantic World understood the potential value of British citizenship and the role British consuls could play in their freedom suits. They exploited this juridical fissure in the fabric of slavery whenever they could. David C. LaFevor (University of Texas at Arlington) examines the narrative, significance, and fallout from the "Argüelles Affair", in the 1860s, in which nearly 1,300 Africans were illegally imported to Cuba aboard the steamship Cicerón. A Spanish army officer captured the Africans after their secret landing in the Bay of Pigs, and they became the centre of a battle for the extraordinary rendition of Spanish slavers from New York. The bulk of the paper explains the experiences of the Africans from Cicerón, as they navigated the complex and corrupt laws that governed their unusual status as emancipados —quasi-enslaved wards of the colonial government. Finally, Oscar de la Torre (UNC Charlotte) analyses 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, and brings his study in conversation with the historiography on Black autonomy in port cities to conclude that such levels of 'toxicity' significantly hampered the so-often alleged improvements in personal autonomy.