In The Year of the Lash, Michele Reid-Vazquez references earlier revolts prior to 1843, including the Aponte Rebellion of 1812 and the Matanzas Revolt of 1825. In all three cases, the white minority in Cuba feared African and Afro-Cuban rebellion long in advance of the actual revolt. Reid-Vasquez writes, “…Anxieties over black rebellion, particularly one that united the colony’s slaves and libres de color, intensified during the first decades of the nineteenth century.” While all of these rebellions trigged repression and brutal interrogations of the black community in order to quickly discover the conspirators, authorities reacted to the 1843 revolt in a concerted effort to reduce the black population through deportations, limiting the return of Afro-Cubans in other parts of the Spanish Caribbean, or classifying Chinese migrants as “white” in order to alter the demographics of Cuba.
After 1844, the spaces available to libres de color were predominantly in unskilled labor, with the opportunities available to artisans and midwives offering a tenuous link to a “higher” social position with which they could interact, but never enter. Libres de color formed community spaces in order to better themselves, but even these offered limited opportunities outside of libres de color communities. Reid-Vazquez writes, “Despite these outlets for self-improvement, free blacks, slaves, as well as the Chinese, remained dissatisfied with their low status and inequality within Cuba’s social hierarchy,” but found calls for equality rebutted when Spanish authorities invoked the memory of Haiti. These spaces are important since they preserve cultural identities and offer opportunities for limited resistance.
The Escalara era’s legacy was groups of Afro-Cubans who renegotiated their place within the Spanish empire, refuting the previous honor of the militia of color and forming an identity based on a larger network that included exiles living in the United States, Mexico, and throughout the Caribbean world in a struggle to secure their rights. Describing the situation of the libres de color, Reid-Vazquez writes, “Free, but by no means equal to creoles or Spaniards, with varying degrees of legal liberty, and of diverse territorial origins, libres de color in early nineteenth-century Cuba learned to negotiate the constraints and contradictions of race and empire by eluding, undermining, or collaborating with the colonial system.” Continued changes in Cuba following the abolition of slavery “modified the structures and trajectory of Spanish imperial hegemony,” suggesting the possibility for further challenges to Spanish rule. ( )