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well as the United States, introduced limitations on the practice of manumission.
Officials in Spain’s new world possessions not only resisted adopting similar limitations,
but in fact, took steps to codify the practice of self-purchase (Klein 1986). The result was
a dramatic growth in the number of free blacks throughout Spain’s colonies. Everywhere,
except Cuba, the number of free blacks grew to double or triple the number of slaves
(Klein 1986). In Cuba, the continuing importance of slave labor and the continuing
importation of slaves meant that the population of free people of color, while
considerable, was still smaller than the slave population (Klein 1986). The size of the
enslaved workforce, and its centrality to production, meant that plantation owners would
suffer a significant loss in the event of an island-wide emancipation.
In Cuba, one found the combination of the ongoing importance of slavery and a
growing number of free blacks. Elsewhere in Spanish America, creole elites, confronted
by the prospect of a growing population of freedmen, clung to structures of order that
reproduced patterns of stratification that preserved white privilege and black
marginalization (Klein 1986). In each of these societies, white populations were
concerned that this caste-like system of order would breakdown, and free blacks, drawing
on skills developed in the workplace, and the supportive assistance of church and
fraternal organizations, would emerge as economic competitors or at minimum
independent producers, rather than laborers, socially-conditioned to toil in subservient
roles (Klein 1986). These fears were dramatically heightened in Cuba. In Cuba, the
proximity of the United States, and the fact that pro-independence forces spent time in
North America organizing their resistance to Spanish rule, meant that liberal concepts and
a belief in the fundamental equality of all citizens informed the character of the struggle
for liberation and shaped the expectations of Cuba’s people of color (Perez, Jr. 1999)
1
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Convention