Combining archaeological and historical methods, Gabino La Rosa Corzo provides the most detailed and accurate available account of the runaway slave settlements (palenques) that formed in the inaccessible mountain chains of eastern Cuba from 1737 to 1850, decades before the end of slavery on the island. The traces that remain of these communities provide important clues to historical processes such as slave resistance and emancipation, anticolonial insurgency, and the emergence of a free peasantry. Some of the communities developed into thriving towns that still exist today. La Rosa challenges the claims of previous scholars and demonstrates how romanticized the communities have become in historical memory. In part by using detailed maps drawn on site, La Rosa shows that palenques were smaller and fewer in number than previously thought and they contained mostly local, rather than long-distance, fugitives. In addition, the residents were less aggressive and violent than myth holds, often preferring to flee rather than fight a system of oppression that was even more effective and organized than generally supposed. La Rosa's study illuminates many social and economic issues related to the African diaspora in the Caribbean, with particular focus on slavery, resistance, and independence. This translation makes the book available in English for the first time.

Combining archaeological and historical methods, Gabino La Rosa Corzo provides the most detailed and accurate available account of the runaway slave settlements (palenques) that formed in the inaccessible mountain chains of eastern Cuba from 1737 t

Putting the voices of the enslaved front and center, Gloria Garcia Rodriguez's study presents a compelling overview of African slavery in Cuba and its relationship to the plantation system that was the economic center of the New World. A major essay by Garcia, who has done decades of archival research on Cuban slavery, introduces the work, providing a history of the development, maintenance, and economy of the slave system in Cuba, which was abolished in 1886, later than in any country in the Americas except Brazil. The second part of the book features eighty previously unpublished primary documents selected by Garcia that vividly illustrate the experiences of Cuba's African slaves. This translation offers English-language readers a substantial look into the very rich, and much underutilized, material on slavery in Cuban archives and is especially suitable for teaching about the African diaspora, comparative slavery, and Cuban studies. Highlighting both the repressiveness of slavery and the legal and social spaces opened to slaves to challenge that repression, this collection reveals the rarely documented voices of slaves, as well as the social and cultural milieu in which they lived.

"A significant contribution in Caribbean archaeology. Singleton weaves archaeological and documentary evidence into a compelling narrative of the lives of the enslaved at Santa Ana de Biajacas."--Patricia Samford, author of Subfloor Pits and the Archaeology of Slavery in Colonial Virginia "Presents results of the first historical archaeology in Cuba by an American archaeologist since the 1950s revolution. Singleton's extensive historical research provides rich context for this and future archaeological investigations, and the entire body of her pioneering research provides comparative material for other studies of African American life and institutional slavery in the Caribbean and the Americas."--Leland Ferguson, author of God's Fields: Landscape, Religion, and Race in Moravian Wachovia "Singleton's enlightening findings on plantation slavery life will undoubtedly constitute a reference point for future studies on Afro-Cuban archaeology."--Manuel Barcia, author of The Great African Slave Revolt of 1825: Cuba and the Fight for Freedom in Matanzas Cuba had the largest slave society of the Spanish colonial empire. At Santa Ana de Biajacas the plantation owner sequestered slaves behind a massive masonry wall. In the first archaeological investigation of a Cuban plantation by an English speaker, Theresa Singleton explores how elite Cuban planters used the built environment to impose a hierarchical social order upon slave laborers. Behind the wall, slaves reclaimed the space as their own, forming communities, building their own houses, celebrating, gambling, and even harboring slave runaways. What emerged there is not just an identity distinct from other North American and Caribbean plantations, but a unique slave culture that thrived despite a spartan lifestyle. Singleton's study provides insight into the larger historical context of the African diaspora, global patterns of enslavement, and the development of Cuba as an integral member of the larger Atlantic World.

A collection of scholarly essays exploring the American Civil War from international perspectives. In an attempt to counter the insular narratives of much of the sesquicentennial commemorations of the Civil War in the United States, editors David T. Gleeson and Simon Lewis present this collection of essays that examine the war as more than a North American conflict, one with transnational concerns. The book, while addressing the origins of the Civil War, places the struggle over slavery and sovereignty in the United States in the context of other conflicts in the Western hemisphere. Additionally, Gleeson and Lewis offer an analysis of the impact of the war and its results overseas. Although the Civil War was the bloodiest conflict in US history and arguably its single most defining event, this work underscores the reality that the war was by no means the only conflict that ensnared the global imperial powers in the mid-nineteenth century. In some ways the Civil War was just another part of contemporary conflicts over the definitions of liberty, democracy, and nationhood. The editors have successfully linked numerous provocative themes and convergences of time and space to make the work both coherent and cogent. Subjects include such disparate topics as Florence Nightingale, Gone with the Wind, war crimes and racial violence, and choices of allegiance made by immigrants to the United States. While we now take for granted the nation’s values of freedom and democracy, we cannot understand the impact of the Civil War and the victorious “new birth of freedom” without thinking globally. The contributors to The Civil War as Global Conflict reveal that Civil War-era attitudes toward citizenship and democracy were far from fixed or stable. Race, ethnicity, nationhood, and slavery were subjects of fierce controversy. Examining the Civil War in a global context requires us to see the conflict as a seminal event in the continuous struggles of people to achieve liberty and fulfill the potential of human freedom. The book concludes with a coda that reconnects the global with the local and provides ways for Americans to discuss the war and its legacy more productively. Contributors: O. Vernon Burton; Edmund L. Drago; Hugh Dubrulle; Niels Eichhorn; W. Eric Emerson; Amanda Foreman; David T. Gleeson; Matthew Karp; Simon Lewis; Aaron W. Marrs; Lesley Marx; Joseph McGill; James M. McPherson; Alexander Noonan; Theodore N. Rosengarten; Edward B. Rugemer; Jane E. Schultz; Aaron Sheehan-Dean; Christopher Wilkins “The writers of this collection effectively balance local and global contexts to produce a significant text that is invaluable to any scholar interested in research desiring to move away from ‘pantomime-like North-South, black-white, blue-gray binaries.’” —Jesse Tyler Lobbs, Kansas State University

During the violent years of war marking Cuba's final push for independence from Spain, over 3,000 Cuban emigres, men and women, rich and poor, fled to Mexico. But more than a safe haven, Mexico was a key site, Dalia Antonia Muller argues, from which the expatriates helped launch a mobile and politically active Cuban diaspora around the Gulf of Mexico. Offering a new transnational vantage on Cuba's struggle for nationhood, Muller traces the stories of three hundred of these Cuban emigres and explores the impact of their lives of exile, service to the revolution and independence, and circum-Caribbean solidarities. While not large in number, the emigres excelled at community building, and their effectiveness in disseminating their political views across borders intensified their influence and inspired strong nationalistic sentiments across Latin America. Revealing that emigres' efforts were key to a Cuban Revolutionary Party program for courting Mexican popular and diplomatic support, Muller shows how the relationship also benefited Mexican causes. Cuban revolutionary aspirations resonated with Mexican students, journalists, and others alarmed by the violation of constitutional rights and the increasing conservatism of the Porfirio Diaz regime. Finally, Muller follows emigres' return to Cuba after the Spanish-American War, their lives in the new republic ineluctably shaped by their sojourn in Mexico.

This book examines Caribbean people resisting racial, political, and social oppression from the eve of the 1790s Haitian Revolution to the twenty-first century. Migrating rebels, shipments of newspapers, rumors, and acts of resistance themselves inspired people throughout the Caribbean who launched their own acts of defiance, illustrating the transnational nature of Caribbean resistance. Some people fought to be left alone, ungovernable, and masterless. Other people fought to free their ethnicity or race, their class, or their nation. Men and women employed a range of tactics from violent armed uprisings to fleeing repression and starting their own communities. Through song, language, religion and festivals, they maintained cultures and identities against oppressive norms that devalued or sought to destroy those cultures and identities. People declared strikes and riots against economic oppression. Women and mothers mobilized for their and their children’s freedoms. Across the Caribbean, people confronted oppression and in so doing illustrated their humanity and agency.

In the early nineteenth century the major economic players of the Atlantic trade lanes -- the United States, Brazil, and Cuba -- witnessed explosive commercial growth. Commodities like cotton, coffee, and sugar contributed to the fantastic wealth of an elite few and the enslavement of many. As a result of an increased population and concurrent economic expansion, the United States widened its trade relationship with Cuba and Brazil, importing half of Brazil's coffee exports and 82 percent of Cuba's total exports by 1877. Disease, Resistance, and Lies examines the impact of these burgeoning markets on the Atlantic slave trade between these countries from 1808 -- when the U.S. government outlawed American involvement in the slave trade to Cuba and Brazil -- to 1867, when slave traffic to Cuba ceased. In his comparative study, Dale Graden engages several important historiographic debates, including the extent to which U.S. merchants and capital facilitated the slave trade to Brazil and Cuba, the role of infectious disease in ending the trade to those countries, and the effect of slave revolts in helping to bring the transatlantic slave trade to an end. Graden situates the transatlantic slave trade within the expanding and rapidly changing international economy of the first half of the nineteenth century, offering a fresh analysis of the "Southern Triangle Trade" that linked Cuba, Brazil, and Africa. Disease, Resistance, and Lies challenges more conservative interpretations of the waning decades of the transatlantic slave trade by arguing that the threats of infectious disease and slave resistance both influenced policymakers to suppress slave traffic to Brazil and Cuba and also made American merchants increasingly unwilling to risk their capital in the transport of slaves.

Despite its hard-nosed emphasis on the demystifying realism of Marxist-Leninist ideology, the political imagery of the Cuban revolution--and the state that followed--conjures up its own magical seductions and fantasies of power. In this fascinating account, Kenneth Routon shows how magic practices and political culture are entangled in Cuba in unusual and intimate ways. Routon describes not only how the monumentality of the state arouses magical sensibilities and popular images of its hidden powers, but he also explores the ways in which revolutionary officialdom has, in recent years, tacitly embraced and harnessed vernacular fantasies of power to the national agenda. In his brilliant analysis, popular culture and the state are deeply entangled within a promiscuous field of power, taking turns siphoning the magic of the other in order to embellish their own fantasies of authority, control, and transformation. This study brings anthropology and history together by examining the relationship between ritual and state power in revolutionary Cuba, paying particular attention to the roles of memory and history in the construction and contestation of shared political imaginaries.

On a late September day in 1837, shortly after sunset, a group of six slaves marched into the small Cuban village of Güira de Melena, beating African drums and singing loudly. Alarmed, villagers rushed into the streets with machetes, sabers, and spears, ready to take action against the disobedient slaves. Yet this makeshift parade never evolved into the violent rebellion the villagers expected. Though the slaves who lived on Cuban coffee and sugar plantations sometimes defied their captors by orchestrating fierce uprisings and committing murder and suicide, they also resisted in less overt ways -- by running away, feigning sickness, breaking tools, and by maintaining their own cultures. In Seeds of Insurrection, Manuel Barcia examines many largely overlooked ways in which African and Creole slaves in Cuba defied domination in the first half of the nineteenth century. Ethnic and geographic origins, as well as slaves' personal experiences, affected their resistance to bondage. Dividing resistance into two broad types -- violent and nonviolent -- Barcia examines when and why the slaves chose certain forms. Creole slaves grew up in Cuba, for example, so they learned both the language of their ancestors and Spanish, and they came to understand their Spanish masters as few African-born slaves ever could. Consequently, they cleverly used the few rights colonial laws offered them to their advantage. African-born slaves, by contrast, carried with them their memories from home, their religious beliefs, jokes, and songs, and they dealt with enslavement by incorporating this cultural heritage into their everyday activities. Barcia demonstrates the ways in which the slaves made use of the privacy of their huts and barracks and the lack of surveillance in the fields to voice their ideas and opinions -- through song, religion, gossip, folktales, and jokes -- within an acceptable degree of safety. Relying primarily on transcripts of local and central court proceedings involving slaves, free people of color, slave owners, and witnesses, Barcia reveals the slaves' view of their world. He also explores the forms of domination practiced by colonial authorities, plantation masters, and overseers, gleaning insight from innovative sources, including medical reports and diaries of rancheadores, as well as public and private correspondence, newspapers, and the contributions of contemporary scholars. In Seeds of Insurrection, Barcia expands the definition of resistance and adds an invaluable dimension to the understanding of slavery in the Americas.