Cuba under war (1868-1880):

increased surveillance and workers of color under suspicion

Abstract

In Cuba, since the first decades of slave labor there has been a concern to oversee and hinder any independent activity of men and women of color; legislation tried to control and punish actions deemed inappropriate or harmful by slaveholders and the colonial administration; in the nineteenth century, this apprehension was accentuated due to the internal and external socio-political context. In this article, we will try to understand how the climate of tension that deepened in Cuba, in the second half of the 19th century, reverberated in the lives of urban workers in Havana, making them repeated targets of suspicion; through documents such as police records, laws, censuses, among others, we will try to understand how the outbreak and prolongation of the Ten Years War (1868-1878) and the Chiquita War (1879-1880), made the daily life of colored people more difficult.