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assumed, the discipline required for self-directed-application to the tasks of the
workplace. Planters were not prepared to adopt these changes, and any effort to do so
would be by necessity carried out over many years (Gallenga 1992). Furthermore, in a
new Cuban nation, the sizeable community of freedmen would surely have been expected
to give refuge to and support slaves and former slaves, just as the community of free
blacks in Jamaica had done during the apprenticeship period.
These themes are developed in Ada Ferrer’s Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation and
Revolution, 1868-1898. In the western regions of the island, where sugar cultivation
dominated economic life and planters relied on the labor of slaves, support for the cause
of independence was weakest and concerns about the consequences of the mobilization of
free blacks was widespread (Ferrer 1999). Antonio C.N. Gallenga, traveling through
Cuba during these tumultuous years, found a planting class convinced of the necessity of
maintaining slave labor and who, if forced to adopt new methods of carrying out the
agricultural and manufacturing work of producing sugar, wanted to move toward these
changes on their own terms. Gallenga, sympathetic to the planters’ cause, offered the
following observation:
The immediate emancipation of the Negroes would soon bring back the whole black race to the
instincts of its native African savagery; the worst horrors which afflicted San Domingo and which
threaten Jamaica…would be reproduced in this Island, where they would be aggravated by the evils
inflicted by the Insurrection—a movement which already, in a great measure, relies on Negro
sympathies, and reckons many Negroes among its most determined and efficient combatants (Gallenga
1992, 85).
The combination of the need (in planters’ minds) to maintain a system of production
dependent on slave labor and fear of the volatile effects of a national rebellion, drove
planters to feel ambivalent about the goals of the Ten Years’ War. Cuban planters were
restless and unhappy with their relationship with Spain and the economic price they paid
Convention