Precarious Freedoms: Slaves in Cuba Between the Late Eighteenth and the Early Nineteenth Centuries

This chapter focuses on a distinctive type of slave: the coartado slave, emphasizing their role as a labor force at the intersection of race and labor relations in the Hispanic Caribbean at the end of the colonial period. Despite the laws offering insufficient tools for the slaves to respond to their vital and labor ambitions, there was room for resistance. The analysis of freedom lawsuits brought to court or settled in conciliation underscores the rental of coartado slaves as a workforce and their association with the domestic space and, therefore, to female slavery. Moreover, this study rescues the slave’s voices to underline asymmetrical dependencies and, consequently, the existence of a scenario beyond freedom and slavery.