The Path to Abolition

This chapter focuses on the figure of the legal representatives of the slaves, or síndico. Due to new regulations issued in 1840, the work of the síndicos was be limited to cases of manumission or emancipation and complaints made by slaves against their masters. The ability to take on more complex cases, or other types of cases in general, would require the written permission of either owners or judges. Síndicos were also given the authority to intervene and represent slaves surrendered to the court in lieu of damages. This chapter explores how the role changed over the years and to what extent síndicos were key players in the story of coartación during this period.

Freeing Oneself

In the nineteenth century, coartación had taken a legal leap from being an option requiring the master’s consent to being a demand slaves could make on their masters. Paradoxically, this qualitative leap made the slaves’ subjection to their owners all the more acute. As the century progressed, enforced emancipation of the slaves driven by masters became more widespread in the society. Equally, however, coartación processes were blocked, at the master’s whim. Slaves’ self-purchase became a problem on large plantations, and the movement of slaves from city to country and from country to city was increasingly common. This indicator underscores the fact that slave hiring in rural areas became more widespread. Within the sugar estates, coartados could not earn money as easily because they were not allowed to leave without a consent letter from the masters, and, because on rural areas, commerce and the exercise of the trades that allowed them to earn wages were limited.

Slaves and Labor Pools

When slaves were seized, complications often arose between those claiming ownership over them. Dire as their situation was, things took a turn for the worse when coartados entered the depósitos, where their special status as slaves was suspended and, in consequence, they stopped receiving income. Síndicos were charged with helping the coartados in the depósito, and with serving as their legal protectors, but it was not uncommon for the síndicos or their colleagues to try to squeeze some economic benefit out of the relationship.

The Promised Freedom

An essential aspect of the process of abolishing slavery in Cuba was the need for the state to impose its will on the private master-slave sphere. There were other abolitionist projects too, based on coartación and the system of lotteries. More importantly, juntas, destined to oversee the emancipation of slaves, were created across the island. This chapter looks at the final years of Cuban slavery and how the status of coartados came under new threats, until the institution of slavery was finally abolished.

Introduction

The word coartación was applied to that existential interval between slavery and freedom, and to be effective it required more or less kindly masters who ultimately kept their word. Once this route toward freedom was codified into law, it immediately became the subject of intense debate in Atlantic history. In this book, we argue that coartación generated income for the owner, encouraged productivity, and created a submission situation fed by the expectations that had been created in the slave. To demonstrate these ineffective levels of coartación, we use a qualitative approach that relies on slaves’ claims, often of a complaining nature, and that focuses on the modifications of the tradition regarding this variant of manumission. Ultimately, we aim to demonstrate that coartación laws were not followed in practice, and that as time went by, the process of coartación increasingly turned into a battleground between the enslaved who aspired to be free and those who owned them and wanted to keep a certain degree of control over the mechanisms that guaranteed a road to freedom.

“Roaming Coartados”

Sugar cane plantations began to incorporate coartados in the mid-nineteenth century. This chapter examines the shift of labor from city to country. While many coartados did everything in their power to remain in Havana, where their right to change owners or buy themselves out of slavery tended to be more easily recognized, others remained in rural areas where they were subject to the same rights, or rather lack of rights, as any rural slave.

An Institution for the Advancement of Slaves into Freedmen?

The main objective of hired slaves was to have their price of coartación set at a low amount. The higher the price of coartación, the more money they would have to turn over to their owners, although the portion of wages that either party might hold back was inconsistent. Generally speaking, agreements were made after private negotiations, and adjustments badly regulated. Coartados’ personal earnings were reduced by the percentage they were obliged to pay to their masters during their coartación period; in other words, they had to pay a kind of “interest” on their masters’ investment. This chapter explains the legal dispersal of coartación and how the jurisprudence of the time worked.

Conclusion

In this study, we look beyond the classic perception of coartación as paid manumission or simple self-purchase; that way of looking at it is insufficient—at some point that meaning, that definition, was lost, or at least twisted. Being a coartado did not consign one to a rigid socio-economic status, nor did coartación conform to a regular labor pattern that arose from the predominance of large sugar plantations, haciendas, and the principles on which they worked. Slave owners who refused to recognize the law or regulations by which a slave might purchase his or her own freedom “on the instalment plan,” by rejecting the meaning of it that might be favorable to the slave, made coartación an unstable concept.

The Hidden Face of Urban Slavery

Understanding the urban rental market is crucial if we are to grasp the multiple ways in which coartados were forced to react to new, damaging scenarios. As new changes to the urban rental market came into existence, and as their impact on the slavery-based service sector expanded, coartados found themselves often trapped in what can only be described as a buyer-to-buyer dynamic, which forced them to go from one master to another, almost always against the wishes of those who owned them, and frequently against their own wishes too.