18
In a generation, the Cuban planting class was reduced to insignificance. While in
my view the abolition of slavery transformed how planters calculated the costs and
benefits of seeking separation from Spain, another view could be that it is not entirely
clear whether planters’ preferences could have played a meaningful role in shaping the
give-and-take of Cuba’s War of Independence, due to their profound marginalization over
the last part of the nineteenth century.
CONCLUSIONS AND CONSEQUENCES
Cubans first took up arms to drive Spanish authority from its shores in 1868. The
war ended in failure. The theme developed here is that one of the reasons for this failure
was the political economy of race in Cuba. Wealthy landholders turned away from the
movement for independence. Prominent among their concerns was a fear that certain
social elements, primarily populations of color who possessed their own property and to
some measure controlled their own economic fate, would continue to agitate for an
expanded political voice even after independence was won (Perez, Jr. 1995; Ferrer 1999).
The creole elites wanted to take from the Spanish political power and control over the
economic fortunes of the island, but they did not want to replace Spanish rule with a
significantly expanded civic union, nor did they want to see their system of production,
dependent on slave labor, collapse.
Without creole support, the insurrectionists lost the Ten Year’s War. As
Anderson points out, continental liberation was made possible by the inability of a
weakening Spanish master to hold down a land-mass in revolt. Cuba was a small
territory attempting to overcome an overwhelming Spanish force that, having been
Convention