National mythologies often require a significant simplification of historical guilt. In today's educational narrative, Cuba's history has been sweetened with a story of colonial victimhood: a ruthless Spanish empire imposing the horror of human bondage on a defenseless local population.
However, examining 19th-century records challenges this comforting myth. The defense, preservation, and reform of the plantation system were not solely dictated by Madrid; rather, they were the most lucid and fierce political and economic endeavors of Cuba's own landowning elite, known as the "sacarocracy."
When Peninsular liberalism threatened property rights over human bodies, the island's white aristocracy prioritized their plantations over any reforms from the mainland, even conspiring to break away from Spain and join the slave states of the southern United States rather than accept externally imposed emancipation.
The Cádiz Conflict: Peninsular Liberalism vs. Creole Ownership
The first major clash occurred in the Cádiz Cortes. Popular belief attributes the abolitionist push to discontented colonies, but parliamentary records reveal the opposite. On March 26, 1811, New Spanish deputy José Miguel Guridi y Alcocer proposed halting the slave trade and advancing freedom for the children of slaves. Shortly after, Asturian deputy Agustín de Argüelles, a central figure in Peninsular liberalism, demanded the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, arguing that founding a nation of free citizens was incompatible with the empire's ongoing enslavement of Africans.
Cuban deputies Andrés de Jáuregui, representing Havana, and Juan Bernardo O'Gavan, representing Santiago de Cuba, responded not with silent shame but with direct opposition. They insisted the matter be discussed privately, away from the public records of the Diario de Sesiones, to avoid alarming landowners or provoking rebellion. The 1812 Constitution, despite its rhetoric of universal citizenship, ultimately cemented a compromise: Article 22 reserved full Spanish citizenship for those "native" to both hemispheres, excluding the African-descended population—free or enslaved—from the political body except through express permission from the Cortes. In practice, Cádiz liberalism chose to negotiate with Cuba's slaveholding power rather than confront it.
Arango y Parreño: Architect of Enlightened Slavery Economics
A key theoretical piece of this resistance was the Representation of the City of Havana to the Cortes, drafted in 1811 by Francisco de Arango y Parreño, the era's most brilliant economist and an intellectual architect of Cuba's sugar boom. Arango wrote not as a submissive subject but as a Creole defending his class's financial survival with state-centric arguments.
Two decades earlier, in his "Discourse on the Agriculture of Havana and Means to Promote It" (1792), Arango had supported absolute freedom in the slave trade—achieved that same year—as essential for Cuba to fill the void left by the collapse of Saint-Domingue following the Haitian Revolution. His calculation was explicitly opportunistic: the destruction of the world's largest sugar colony presented, in his view, "a unique moment" for Cuba to capture the international sugar market, necessitating more enslaved labor, not less.
Over time, however, with the legal end of the trade and increasing British pressure on Spain to suppress it, Arango shifted toward a controlled transition. In later writings, he proposed emulating southern U.S. plantations and establishing "slave breeding"—the internal reproduction of labor under master control—as a substitute for African imports. Simultaneously, he advocated for "whitening": gradually replacing the enslaved population with European, Canary Island, or Peninsular free workers to curb the black demographic growth and sustain the white minority's political dominance. This wasn't a philanthropic awakening for Arango; it was demographic engineering serving the social stability of the sugar industry.
Saco: Racial Nationalism and the Arithmetic of Fear
In the following generation, the slavery dilemma intertwined with developing a unique Cuban identity. José Antonio Saco provided the most systematic analysis of the issue in his "Memoir on Idleness in the Island of Cuba" (1831), where he argued that slavery posed not only a demographic risk but a moral rot: by associating manual labor with slavery, it degraded the work ethic even among poor whites and promoted widespread idleness. His empirical research discipline and source comparison—evident in his monumental "History of Slavery of the African Race in the New World," where he meticulously corrected earlier chroniclers using primary archives—applied to the social diagnosis of his island.
Saco's nationalism, however, had narrow racial boundaries. He envisioned Cuba's future exclusively in terms of "white labor" and vigorously opposed both the African slave trade and the introduction of Chinese contract workers, fearing that ethnic diversity would dissolve the cohesion of a nation he imagined as homogeneously Hispanic. When Peninsular liberalism or British diplomacy pushed for sudden emancipation, the Cuban elite wielded their boldest geopolitical weapon: the threat of annexation to the United States.
Nevertheless, Saco 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 Cuban language, religion, and identity under the Anglo-Saxon tide, and wouldn't even guarantee long-term protection of Creole slaveholding interests. His opposition stemmed not from a moral objection to slavery itself but from a different calculation on how to best preserve "his" Cuba.
Betancourt Cisneros and the Conspiracy of Narciso López
Gaspar Betancourt Cisneros, known as "El Lugareño," represented an opposing stance within the same reformist camp. Linked to the annexationist newspaper La Verdad, published in New York since 1848—where he briefly crossed paths with Saco before the latter distanced himself from the movement—Betancourt Cisneros criticized the lack of patriotism among landowners who "had no homeland but their interests." However, his remedy was equally exclusive: he advocated for expelling the black population from the island and replacing it with massive European immigration, constructing a purified identity that fundamentally denied the mestizaje already present in the barracks and fields.
The same circle of interests financed Narciso López's military expeditions between 1849 and 1851, aimed at tearing Cuba from Spain and incorporating it into the American Union. The underlying calculation wasn't abstract: they feared that Madrid, pressured by the Anglo-Spanish treaties of 1817 and 1835 against the slave trade, would eventually yield on slavery abolition itself and saw in the U.S. slaveholding South—and financiers like Mississippi Governor John A. Quitman or "Manifest Destiny" ideologue John L. O'Sullivan—an ultimate guarantee that their enslaved workforce would never be liberated by decree. The execution of López by garrote in Havana in September 1851, alongside several American followers, didn't end the project: the annexationist fantasy survived as a resource for the sacarocracy whenever Spanish reformism threatened their human assets.
Testimonies from Foreign Travelers
This social architecture was recorded, without the burden of local interests, in the chronicles of foreign observers. British diplomat Charles Augustus Murray and his compatriot Henry A. Murray, in "Lands of the Slave and the Free" (1855), debunked the notion of "mild" or paternalistic Spanish slavery, documenting the brutal structural labor in the sugar mills. Swedish writer Fredrika Bremer, in her 1851 letters, described Cuba as "both the hell and paradise for blacks," noting how Cuban officials accepted bribes—ranging from thirty to fifty pesos per head—to allow clandestine African landings long after the trade was illegal.
Behind all this lay a shared fear among reformists, annexationists, and loyalists alike: the echo of the Haitian Revolution. Blacks and mulattos weren't seen as oppressed compatriots deserving redemption but as existential threats to the civilization the white elite believed they were constructing.
The Weight of Human Contradictions
Judging Arango y Parreño, Saco, or Betancourt Cisneros solely by 21st-century morals impedes historical understanding. None of them operated as abstract philosophers; they were pragmatic strategists of political economy and their class's survival. Their gradual transition projects, whitening plans, and resistance to reforms from Madrid responded to the need to lead Cuba toward productive modernization without collapsing the island's wealth—or, above all, without ceding political control to those they had enslaved.
Their ideas are profoundly condemnable today. But recognizing that it was the Creole aristocracy itself, not just the Spanish crown, that designed, defended, and prolonged the slave system isn't relativism: it is simply well-conducted history. Understanding it this way allows teaching without placing the blame solely beyond the seas, and without absolving those on the island who coldly calculated the worth of another human's freedom in pesos and sugar measures.
Understanding Cuba's Role in the Slave Trade
What role did Cuban elites play in the perpetuation of slavery?
Cuban elites, known as the sacarocracy, were instrumental in preserving and reforming the plantation system. They prioritized their economic interests over reforms from Madrid, even considering annexation to the U.S. to protect slavery.
How did foreign observers view Cuban slavery?
Foreign observers, like British diplomat Charles Augustus Murray, documented the harsh realities of Cuban slavery, countering the notion of its mildness and highlighting the ongoing clandestine slave trade.
Why did some Cubans consider annexation to the United States?
Some Cubans saw annexation to the U.S. as a way to avoid Spanish-imposed emancipation and to align with the southern U.S. states that supported slavery, ensuring their economic interests were protected.