Family ties in Cuban slave society

Camillia Cowling looks at a microhistory of slaves in Cuba and how it sheds light on a little studied world.

Matrimonio y familia en el ingenio: una utopía posible. La Habana (1825-1886)
María de los Ángeles Meriño Fuentes and Aisnara Perera Díaz
San Antonio de los Baños: Unicornio, 2007
121 pp.

Matrimonio y familia en el ingenio: una utopía posible (Marriage and Family on the Plantation: A Possible Utopia) is a small book that makes a big contribution. It opens a window onto the world of the enslaved family on Cuban sugar plantations - a world which has been very little studied and which has been said not to have existed at all (1). Focusing on two ingenios in the province of Havana, the study traces slave family life through painstaking work with local parish registers. Slaves in Cuba, it reveals, valued family ties and struggled endlessly to maintain them across time and space. Such links proved more lasting than the institution of slavery under which they were formed, continuing past abolition in 1886 and throughout the twentieth century. In the book's final pages, its protagonists emerge from the dusty archives and greet us smiling in the form of Teresita Valdés Vélez, a descendant of one of the enslaved families studied. Teresita, interviewed by the authors at her home in Havana province, was amazed at how much they knew about her family's long history.



Dialoguing with Cuban, Caribbean, United States and Brazilian history, the authors navigate complex questions of slave marriage and family formation. For the Catholic Church in nineteenth-century Cuba, marriage was a means of avoiding "sinful" extra-marital sex. For some slave owners, slave marriage was merely an inconvenient distraction from sugar production. For others, it helped maintain stability and obedience on plantations and, as the flow of new enslaved Africans was gradually stemmed, helped reproduce the labour force. Meanwhile, slaves had their own ideas about the significance of family ties. They were a tool for maintaining ethnic, lineage and cultural links, and for preserving humanity and dignity under conditions which were far less than human (2). How much did each of these respective visions influence the reality of slave family life on Cuban sugar plantations? Did slaves' family formation strategies resist or complement those of owners? One short study cannot solve such thorny questions. However, the fact that they are raised at all is one of the most important contributions of a work that will surely become required reading for future historians interested in Cuban slave society.

Some of the unanswered questions have to do with the book's microhistorical focus on just two Havana ingenios. How representative were these of the wider history of Cuban ingenios? Jacinto González Larrinaga, who founded one of the ingenios studied, practised and publicly advocated respect for slave family ties. According to the authors, it was as a result of this policy that, on his death in 1869, most of his slaves possessed demonstrable family ties. But surely Don Jacinto was not typical of Cuban slave-owners? Soon after reading the book, I toured the Dionisia coffee plantation in Matanzas with a descendant of its nineteenth-century founders. He paused at the ruins of one building to tell the story, passed down through his own family, of slave men and women who were selected and locked up in couples for breeding while the armed overseer guarded the door. How do such collective memories of slavery, alive in Cuba today, square with the search for dignified family life that - as Meriño and Perera show - so many slaves engaged in? How do we recognise slaves' agency without forgetting the oppressive conditions in which their struggles were formed? And if it is difficult to trace slave family links that did survive slavery, how do we go about writing the histories of countless families that were definitively rent apart by the voracious demands of the sugar economy as slaves were moved or sold across the island?

Collaboration between historians is surely one way forward, ensuring fruitful dialogue between micro and macro perspectives. The Ecclesiastical Sources in Slave Societies Project based at Vanderbilt University aims to digitalize parish registers for slave-owning societies of the Americas, including Cuba. With greater access to this documentation, hopefully more historians will undertake the hard work of demographic analyses, shedding light on the history of countless families across the whole of Cuba and beyond. They will be privileged, as they do so, to tread the ground broken by Matrimonio y Familia.

Camillia Cowling is researching gender, slavery and abolition in Cuba and Brazil on a two-year Leverhulme Study Abroad Fellowship following her PhD at the Institute for the Study of Slavery, Nottingham University, UK (2007).


Notes

(1) See Manuel Moreno Fraginals, El ingenio. Complejo económico-social del azúcar. Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1978, vol. II: 45. (English language version: The Sugar Mill, Monthly Review Press, 1978)

(2) As Rebecca Scott reminded us over twenty years ago, "people can be treated as beasts and not become beasts." See Rebecca Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labour, 1860-1899. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000 [1985]. While Scott did not explicitly focus on the slave family or demography, her conclusions provide an important framework to Meriño and Perera's work. The absence of references to her study is puzzling.


Copyright
Copyright for this work is held jointly between Camillia Cowling and the International Journal of Cuban Studies under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative 3.0 Licence

IJCS Volume 1 Issue 1 June 2008