By the turn of the nineteenth century, as Cuba was gearing up to become one of the world’s largest sugar producer for the world markets, planters and colonial officials in Havana were rolling back many historic protections for smallholders, enslaved people, and free people of African descent, prudential measures that the Crown had historically encouraged as a means of “keeping the peace.” Yet, in Santiago, in the island’s east, many such measures remained in place, and the new coercive policies received a locally specific interpretation inside first-instance district courts. The demographic weight of the free population of African descent and its importance to the economy meant that officials could not rely on coercion alone to control them. Historically, it had been through custom that Santiago’s Afro-descendants had managed their relations with state authorities and with local enslavers and landholders. In an Age of Revolutions, at a time of profound shifts across the Caribbean, they maintained their ground as well as access to custom-based legal protections, even while their Havana counterparts saw theirs besieged on an unprecedented scale.

In Santiago, in Cuba’s far east, a region known to be the cradle of radicalism on the island, peasant communities of African descent laid a distinctive path to emancipation during the nineteenth century. Afro-descendant peasantries did not rely on liberal-abolitionist ideologies of universal freedom as a primary reference point in their struggle for rights. Instead, as they occupied land and pulled themselves out of slavery through manumission, fugitiveness, and unrest, they negotiated their rights through a colonial legal framework that allowed room for local custom. As they chipped away at the institution of slavery gradually yet consistently, they also reimagined colonial racial systems before any of Cuba’s prominent nineteenth-century liberal intellectuals. This introduction provides an outline of the book's main argument and the six chapters that follow.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, no written law numerated the rights of conditionally and partially free individuals, the vast majority of those who would eventually obtain manumission. How much of their time could such individuals control? Could they be punished? Could they live independently? Were the children born of mothers who held this ambiguous status free or enslaved? In courts of first instance, in the absence of illuminating legislation, judges turned to witnesses for arbitration, as enslavers and enslaved vied over the terms of their oral contracts and public reputations. The freedom that emerged from such vernacular legalism was not liberal autonomy. Rather, it was situational dependence on others, usually free and enslaved Afro-descendants who had participated in the coartación in some capacity, and who arbitrated casuistically. Freedom’s legal meanings emerged through such negotiations that belonged to local custom. Historically, these negotiations went back to the cobreros’ customary access to land and coartación as subsistence-based rights. By the 1830s, some enslaved people had redefined such need-based rights as merit-based entitlements.

Between 1808 and 1830, as new coffee plantations developed in Santiago, private actors and local state authorities realized that they did not have the means to coercively control the unprecedented number of enslaved people working in the jurisdiction. Instead, they prudently turned to cooptation. They encouraged the formation of dense familial networks between enslaved people working on coffee estates and between enslaved and free people of color, as well as the distribution of local militia responsibilities to the free Afro-descendant peasant class, who in El Cobre were even given government roles. Although Santiago’s enslaved and free people of African descent would draw inspiration from liberalism and seek to exploit the local elites’ fears of it, they were far more successful at eliciting prerogatives through long-established colonial frameworks: prudential policies that allowed for some redistribution of rights and resources against birth status hierarchies.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, as the state turned more and more custom into positive law, perhaps with the understanding that such measures were a controlled transition to a post-emancipation society, enslaved people in Santiago, as elsewhere, appealed to the state more frequently too. The move away from custom and toward positive law was not always beneficial to the enslaved. The state was now moving to freeze custom’s plasticity, to reduce local autonomy, and to support new commercial endeavors that in certain areas could slow down the pace of emancipation from below. But the people of African descent in Santiago did not remain passive: they rose up in arms, joining anticolonial and antislavery insurgencies, the three wars of independence against Spain (1868–1878, 1879–1880, 1895–1898) – a pivotal moment in the annals of Black liberation in the Western Hemisphere. The traditional familial networks that had formed the foundation of colonial custom were now mobilized on the battlefield in a movement for a liberal republic free of slavery, likely conceived in the popular imagination through the lens of regional autonomy. So were local vernacular understandings of color status, which had reflected some social mobility and had been structured around notions of merit.

The local courts in Santiago also turned to custom to establish the rights and obligations of freed individuals even after letters of manumission had been issued. Even after becoming formally free, manumitted individuals could still be indebted to others. A vast historiography has explored manumission networks primarily from a social perspective, as avenues into freedom. But these networks also had legal effects. Inside the courts, it was members of those very same networks who helped judges clarify how much work debtors should do and what kinds of rights they enjoyed. While constraining, such networks also constituted the foundations of an emerging system of emancipation from below with free people of African descent as its main nodes. As enslaved people became free, they enslaved others whom they freed conditionally on their death. The effect of this pattern was an accelerating manumission rate and, with it, growing expectation among enslaved people to attain freedom. Frequent manumission also helped unfix color statuses within Santiago. Some santiagueros of African descent used color taxonomies to conceive of positions within local hierarchies originating in manumission.

Throughout the nineteenth century, in rural peripheral communities located in the shadows of intensive extraction zones in Latin America, people of African descent forged patchwork freedoms, piece by piece, via the judicial system, for decades and even centuries before broad laws of emancipation were enacted in the nineteenth century. Through this piecemeal process, in regions such as Santiago de Cuba, demographically significant populations of free Afro-descendants gradually emerged through for-purchase manumission. Because purchasing manumission consisted of payments in cash or services made gradually and in installments, many people who sought freedom through this process remained caught between full legal slavery and full legal freedom for years – if not a lifetime. In their efforts to manage their claims, local courts often deferred to communities and their customs for insights into the rights that such individuals deserved. Many people pushed for unexpected prerogatives, claims that gradually undermined the authority of enslavers, while at the same time they called for state support. Sometimes using threats of insurgency and fugitiveness, people seeking freedom through manumission elicited rights from the state in the name of equity and prudence, and therefore unmoored slave and color status from birth status. In places such as Santiago, the outcome was a gradual model of emancipation from below that preceded liberal-nationalist laws of freedom. The meaning of freedom was not abstract; rather, it emerged out of rights negotiated with local authorities, such as the courts, municipal councils, and governors. It was also a model of freedom that depended on staying put, rather than on moving along circum-Caribbean or trans-Atlantic networks. One needed witnesses who could vouch for one’s reputation and behavior. One had to be known and to be bound to a community to succeed. Such ties and their custom-based roots yielded a sense of belonging and of local legal autonomy for people living in the province of Santiago. In the second half of the nineteenth century, this autonomy took overt political expression, fueling key elements of the insurgency in Cuba’s independence wars.