| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Caribbean and Latin America

Luis Martínez-Fernández. Fighting Slavery in the Caribbean: The Life and Times of a British Family in Nineteenth-Century Havana. (Latin American Realities.) Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe. 1998. Pp. xiv, 200.

According to the nineteenth-century German scientist and traveler, Alexander von Humboldt, Spanish laws in Cuba permitted a high degree of manumission, making Cuban slavery flexible and endowing slaves with extraordinary rights (The Island of Cuba [1856]). Cuba's complex social and economic dynamics relegated African slaves to the bottom of the hierarchy, but many freed and enslaved Africans were able to attain various advantages in the system depending on their skills or personal relationships. The island's growing plantation base and service economy created a high demand for laborers, and the demand for slaves outstripped supply. Many land holders turned to Mexicans, indigenous populations, and Asian indentured servants. Some rented slaves from others or relied on the services of the small but growing free population of color. By mid-century, the incentive for the trafficking of African slaves remained great. Havana, Cuba's capital, had become a bustling multicultural, multi-ethnic port city with a growing population, although as late as the 1840s, slaves accounted for more than forty percent of the island's total population. 1

Although Cuba did not abolish slavery until 1886, by the second decade of the nineteenth century, slavery was under attack in various quarters, and the Spanish declared the slave trade illegal in 1820. Opposition to slavery in Cuba took many forms, from slave rebellions and sabotage to international treaties to reduce the sale of human cargo. The British, who had abolished slavery early in the century, played an important role in urging the Cuban economy toward free labor through a number of forums including the Anglo-Spanish treaties of 1817 and 1835 and, more specifically, the jointly staffed Spanish Mixed Commission for the Suppression of the Slave Trade in Sierra Leone and Havana. . . .

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