Powerful Subjects: The Duplicity of Slave Owners in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

In 1820, Cuban priest Juan Bernardo O'Gavan arrived in Madrid with the testing mission of sabotaging the bilateral treaty signed in 1817 between Great Britain and Spain that obliged the latter to bring its involvement in the transatlantic slave trade to an end. For O'Gavan and his employers, the end of this human trafficking was a downright annoyance that threatened the sugar cane-based prosperity enjoyed by the island since the Haitian revolution had given them the opportunity to become leading suppliers of sugar for the international markets. That sugar, however, could only be harvested and sold at astronomical profits thanks to the slave labour imported from Africa. For O'Gavan and his colleagues, begging for the reestablishment of the trade came hand-in-hand with a series of excuses and justifications that concealed the real conditions of existence of their slaves in Cuba's urban and rural environments.This article explores the ways in which Cuban-based merchants and planters attempted to keep a robust control upon their increasingly large slave population, while endeavouring to show to the rest of the world an idyllic picture of Cuban slavery. O'Gavan's pamphleteering in Madrid in the early 1820s was hardly an exception. As a matter of fact, from the late 1790s, Cuban authorities, merchants and planters joined forces in a vain effort to portray Cuban slavery as a harmless and paternalistic institution, exempt from the brutalities that they shrewdly attributed to other slave systems in the Americas.On the one hand, Cuban authorities, merchants and planters offered a public transcript full of praise for the slave society they were building and continuously drummed it up as a humane and well-balanced social system. On the other hand, they relied on a day-to-day hidden transcript that they used and abused to blame their slaves, especially those African-born, for all the flaws they could find in the system.1 This article will also explore the ways in which they built up these public and hidden transcripts and the manner in which their public and private discourses overlapped when necessary, and establish to what degree they were successful in doing so. It will argue that in order to prevail, while hiding the daily acts of inhumanity inherent to the slave system, they used their most gifted intellectuals and their religious and political leverage in order to maintain slavery in Cuba and to increase the transatlantic slave trade.To gain a better understanding of the daily practices of these men, this article relies on the concepts of 'Public' and 'Hidden Transcript', as defined by James C. Scott in his groundbreaking book Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990). By 'Public Transcript', it refers to all practices and discourses elaborated by the Cuban-based elites in order to portray to the rest of the world, an idyllic picture of slavery in Cuba. By opposition, this article considers as a 'Hidden Transcript', those other practices and discourses that took place in private spaces and beyond the public realm. It was in these private spaces where the real character of Cuban slavery was more often than not revealed and discussed.'Civilising' africa and the africansO'Gavan's argument in 1821 was bold and reflected widespread fears of a slave revolt in the island. More to the point, his words also revealed the anxieties felt in Cuba by slave traders and planters, who considered British interventionism as one of the worst evils they faced. Since the British had repeatedly made a point by reporting and highlighting the cruelties of the transatlantic slave trade, even before they had abolished it themselves in 1807, these traders and planters rushed to counter-argue these remarks. They did so not by focusing on the slave trade, which was already practically indefensible at the time, but by highlighting the positives of their slave system, especially for the 'savage' Africans they claimed to be introducing to the civilised world. …