A Preliminary Essay On The Purchase Of Cuba

With a focus on nineteenth century Cuba, this volume examines understudied forms of mobility and networks that emerged during Second Slavery. After being forcibly taken across the Atlantic, enslaved Africans were moved within Cuba, and sometimes sold to owners in other Caribbean islands or the U.S. South. The chapters included in this book, written by historians and literary critics, pay special attention to debates between abolitionists and proslavery ideologues, the ways in which people and ideas moved from the countryside to the city, from one Caribbean Island to the next, and from the United States or the coasts of West Africa to the sugarcane fields. They examine how enslaved persons ran away or were captured and coerced to relocate; how they mobilized information and ideas to ameliorate their situation; and how they were used to advance other people’s interests. Movement, these chapters show, was regularly deployed to reinforce enslavement and the suppression of rights, while at times helping people in their struggle for freedom. This book will be a great resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Latin American Literature, Global Slavery and Postcolonial Studies. The chapters were originally published in the journal Atlantic Studies: Global Currents.

The histories of Cuba and the United States are tightly intertwined and have been for at least two centuries. In Race to Revolution, historian Gerald Horne examines a critical relationship between the two countries by tracing out the typically overlooked interconnections among slavery, Jim Crow, and revolution. Slavery was central to the economic and political trajectories of Cuba and the United States, both in terms of each nation’s internal political and economic development and in the interactions between the small Caribbean island and the Colossus of the North. Horne draws a direct link between the black experiences in two very different countries and follows that connection through changing periods of resistance and revolutionary upheaval. Black Cubans were crucial to Cuba’s initial independence, and the relative freedom they achieved helped bring down Jim Crow in the United States, reinforcing radical politics within the black communities of both nations. This in turn helped to create the conditions that gave rise to the Cuban Revolution which, on New Years’ Day in 1959, shook the United States to its core. Based on extensive research in Havana, Madrid, London, and throughout the U.S., Race to Revolution delves deep into the historical record, bringing to life the experiences of slaves and slave traders, abolitionists and sailors, politicians and poor farmers. It illuminates the complex web of interaction and infl uence that shaped the lives of many generations as they struggled over questions of race, property, and political power in both Cuba and the United States.

This volume presents a social history of life in mid-19th-century Cuba as experienced by George Backhouse (and his wife, Grace), who served on the British Havana Mixed Commission for the Suppression of the Slave Trade. Documented with extracts from the Backhouse's correspondence, diaries and other contemporary papers, Martinez-Fernandez paints a detailed picture of the Cuban slave trade, its role in the sugar industry, and the interrelated contradictions within Cuba's economy, society and politics. The Backhouse story provides addition al insights into important aspects of life in the "male" city of Havana, social antagonisms between Britons and North Americans, interactions with European social circles, religious tension, and the reality of tropical disease. Drama is added to the narrative in the author's description of the tragic and mysterious murder of George Backhouse in August 1855, possibly the result of a slave traders' conspiracy.