The Bonds of Family: Family, Inequality and the Making of the Free Population of Color of Santiago de Cuba, 1840s-1860s

Between the 1840s and the 1860s, eastern Cuba, a Spanish Caribbean borderland outside sugar’s dominion, witnessed the emergence of a large and highly mobilized free population of color that would lay the foundation for the ideal of “racial confraternity” during the Cuban War of Independence. Drawing on social history methods and on over 2,000 manumission letters and freedom suits filed with municipal courts, this paper argues that family politics on coffee plantations in this area were key to the making of an unequal class of people of color. In response to rising slave prices, rural slaveowners tried to use reproductive politics to increase the slave population in their control. The gender balance on coffee plantations facilitated the gradual rise of a creolized slave population by the 1840s, which planters planned to use as coffee pickers. Yet, as coffee plantations entered a period of economic decline during the same time period, these kinship structures started undermining planters’ social control plans. Young creole slaves relied on family members to buy their freedom on an unprecedented scale. Plantation slaves also started turning toward an expanding class of freed people of color to serve as godparents to their children, thereby diversifying their social networks beyond the plantation. Yet, the freedom that some former slaves gained through familial networks and the blurring of familial and market relations which many experienced during their emancipation resulted in lasting forms of social dependency and inequality that would shape local racial ideologies and the mobilization for independence.