Slavery in Cuba: the history that Cubans prefer to forget

The construction of national mythologies often requires a drastic simplification of past grievances. In the contemporary educational narrative, Cuba's historical memory has been sweetened under a narrative of colonial victimhood: a cruel and unyielding Spanish metropolis that imposed the horrors of human servitude vertically upon a defenseless Creole population.

The scrutiny of 19th-century archives dismantles that convenient myth. The defense, preservation, and reform of the plantation system were not solely dictated by Madrid, but rather the most astute—and most fierce—political and economic project of the Cuban landowning elite itself, known as the sacarocracy.

When peninsular liberalism threatened ownership over the human body, the white patriciate of the island did not hesitate to prioritize their sugar mills over any metropolitan reform, and even went so far as to conspire to separate from Spain and join the slaveholding states of the southern United States rather than accept an emancipation decreed from outside.

The Cádiz Schism: Peninsular Liberalism against Creole Property

The first major clash occurred in the Cortes of Cádiz. Popular belief places the abolitionist drive in the discontented colonies; parliamentary reality shows the opposite map. On March 26, 1811, the New Hispanic deputy José Miguel Guridi y Alcocer presented a motion to halt slave trading and move towards the freedom of wombs. Days later, the Asturian deputy Agustín de Argüelles —a central figure of peninsular liberalism— called for the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, arguing that it was an unsustainable contradiction to found a nation of free citizens while the empire continued to seize lives on the shores of Africa.

The response from Cuban deputies Andrés de Jáuregui, representing Havana, and Juan Bernardo O'Gavan, representing Santiago de Cuba, was not one of silent shame but rather direct confrontation. They demanded that the matter be handled with confidentiality, outside the public records of the Session Diary, to avoid alarming landowners or providing arguments for a potential uprising. The very Constitution of 1812, despite its rhetoric of universal citizenship, ultimately sealed the commitment: its Article 22 reserved full Spanish citizenship for the "natives" of both hemispheres, leaving those of African descent—whether free or enslaved—outside the political body unless expressly granted permission by the Cortes. The Cadiz liberalism, in practice, negotiated with the slaveholding power in Cuba rather than confronting it.

Arango and Parreño: the economic engineer of illustrated slavery

The most influential theoretical piece of this resistance was the Representation of the City of Havana to the Cortes, written in 1811 by Francisco de Arango y Parreño, the brightest economist of his generation and the intellectual architect of the Cuban sugar boom. Arango did not write as a submissive subject, but as a Creole defending the financial survival of his class with state arguments.

Two decades earlier, in his Discourse on the Agriculture of Havana and Means to Promote It (1792), Arango had defended the absolute freedom of the slave trade—achieved that same year—as an essential condition for Cuba to fill the void left by the collapse of Saint-Domingue after the Haitian revolution. His reasoning was explicitly opportunistic: the destruction of the largest sugar colony in the world, in his view, created "a unique moment" for the island to capture the international sugar market, and that required more enslaved hands, not fewer.

Over the years, however, in light of the legal end of the slave trade and increasing British pressure on Spain to suppress it, Arango shifted towards a position of controlled transition. In his later writings, he proposed to emulate the plantation model of the southern United States and establish "breeding grounds" for slaves—meaning the internal reproduction of the labor force under the control of masters—as a substitute for African imports. At the same time, he advocated for what he called "whitening": gradually replacing the enslaved population with free European, Canary Island, or mainland Spanish workers, in order to curb the demographic growth of the black population and maintain the political dominance of the white minority. For Arango, this was not a philanthropic awakening; it was demographic engineering aimed at sustaining the social stability of the plantation.

Saco: racial nationalism and the arithmetic of fear

In the following generation, the slavery dilemma intertwined with the formation of a distinct Cuban identity. José Antonio Saco provided the most systematic dissection of the issue in his Memoir on Vagrancy in the Island of Cuba (1831), where he argued that slavery was not only a demographic risk but also a moral blight: by associating manual labor with the status of the slave, it degraded work ethic even among poor whites and fostered widespread idleness. It is the same empirical research discipline and source contrast—evident in his monumental History of the Slavery of the African Race in the New World, where he meticulously corrects earlier chroniclers using primary archives—that he applied to the social diagnosis of his own island.

Saco's nationalism, however, had very narrow racial boundaries. He envisioned the future of Cuba exclusively in terms of "white hands" and fought with equal fervor against the African slave trade and the introduction of Chinese contract workers, fearing that ethnic heterogeneity would undermine the cohesion of a nation he imagined as homogeneously Hispanic. And when peninsular liberalism or British diplomacy pressed for sudden emancipation, the Cuban elite wielded their boldest geopolitical weapon: the threat of annexing to the United States.

Saco, nonetheless, became the sharpest critic of that option: in Ideas on the Incorporation of Cuba into the United States (1848), he argued that annexation would dissolve the Cuban language, religion, and identity under the Anglo-Saxon tide, and that it would not even guarantee, in the long run, the protection of Creole slaveholding interests. His rejection did not stem from a moral objection to slavery as such, but from a different calculation on how to best preserve "his" Cuba.

Betancourt Cisneros and the conspiracy of Narciso López

Gaspar Betancourt Cisneros, "El Lugareño," represented the opposing view within the reformist movement. Associated with the annexationist newspaper La Verdad, published in New York since 1848—where he briefly coincided with Saco before Saco broke away from the movement—Betancourt Cisneros criticized the lack of patriotism among the landowners who "had no homeland other than their interests." However, his remedy was equally exclusionary: he advocated for the removal of the Black population from the island and its replacement with mass European immigration, aiming to build a purified identity that fundamentally denied the mestizaje already present in the barracks and fields.

That same circle of interests financed the military expeditions of Narciso López between 1849 and 1851, with the declared aim of wresting Cuba from Spain to incorporate it into the American Union. The underlying calculation was not abstract: they feared that Madrid, pressured by the Anglo-Spanish treaties of 1817 and 1835 against the slave trade, would eventually yield in the abolition of slavery itself. They viewed the slaveholding South of the United States—and financiers like Mississippi Governor John A. Quitman or the ideologue of "manifest destiny," John L. O'Sullivan—as the ultimate assurance that their properties would never be liberated by decree. The execution of López by garrote in Havana in September 1851, along with several of his American followers, did not put an end to the project: the annexationist fantasy survived as a resource for the oligarchy whenever Spanish reformism threatened their human assets.

The testimony of foreign travelers

This social architecture was recorded without the burden of local interests in the accounts of foreign observers. The British diplomat Charles Augustus Murray and his compatriot Henry A. Murray, in "Lands of the Slave and the Free" (1855), dismantled the notion that Spanish slavery was "gentle" or paternalistic, documenting the structural brutality of work in the sugar mills. The Swedish writer Fredrika Bremer, in her letters from 1851, summarized Cuba as "both hell and the paradise of blacks" and described how Cuban officials collected bribes—between thirty and fifty pesos per head—to allow the clandestine landing of Africans long after the trade was illegal.

Behind all of this lay a shared fear among reformists, annexationists, and loyalists alike: the echo of the Haitian revolution. The Black and mulatto were not viewed as oppressed compatriots deserving of redemption, but rather as an existential threat to the civilization that the white elite believed they were building.

The weight of human contradictions

Judging Arango, Parreño, Saco, or Betancourt Cisneros solely through the lens of 21st-century morality complicates historical understanding. None of the three operated as abstract philosophers; they were pragmatic strategists of political economy and the survival of their class. Their projects for gradual transition, their plans for whitening, and their resistance to reforms imposed from Madrid responded to the need to steer Cuba towards productive modernity without triggering the collapse of the island's wealth—nor, above all, without relinquishing political control to those they themselves had enslaved.

His ideas are today profoundly condemnable. However, acknowledging that it was the criollo elite, and not just the Spanish crown, who designed, defended, and prolonged the system of slavery is not an exercise in relativism: it is simply a better understanding of history. Understanding it this way allows us to teach it without exclusively placing blame across the sea, and without absolving those on the island who coldly calculated how much the freedom of another human being was worth in pesos and arrobas of sugar.