Visiting the Plantation

Visiting the plantation: the white mistress in nineteenth-century Cuba.

Teresa Prados-Torreira

My paper analyzes the figure of the plantation mistress in nineteenth-century Cuba. It focuses on the female slaveholders’ visits to the plantation and how those occasions affected the slaves.

Slaveholding women tended to live in town, making their sporadic visits to the plantation, typically during the Christmas season, fully consequential. The mistress’s presence on the plantation served as an opportunity to reward or punish the slaves, a chance to mediate conflicts and make decisions that would have lasting impact on the slaves’ lives. It was during those visits that children were baptized, slaves were married, and when house slaves were selected. Those brief stays also served the purpose of maintaining, or in some cases shattering, the illusion of the mistress as a benevolent figure and the plantation as a humane environment where the slaves’ physical and spiritual needs were addressed. 

My paper addresses the interaction between the female slaveholder and her slaves during those visits, and by extension the plantation mistress’s impact on nineteenth-century Cuban slavery, a subject that has not received much attention by Cuban historians. My sources will include fiction, newspaper accounts, diaries, and also visual images, including engravings. My approach is that of a cultural historian: I am interested in examining the ideas that helped maintain or question the status quo. My paper argues that, while slaveholding women had no political power in nineteenth-century Cuba, they were instrumental in supporting the long life of Cuban slavery.