In the early morning hours on Monday, 12 January 1829, an enslaved girl named Margarita fled from number 80 Lamparilla Street in Havana intramuros. Footnote 1 The intramural street flowed in an east to west direction beginning near the bay and extended across the city to the edge of the walls that enclosed Havana’s perimeter. Lamparilla Street came to an abrupt stop at the portion of the wall that lay between the two original city gates midway through the length of the walled city.Footnote 2 Outside of the walls, the intramural city gave way to extramuro farmland, barrios or neighbourhoods, and brush and thickets of grass, weeds and wild cane alongside the new construction for Havana’s extramural promenades. All could provide a young girl with cover. At its origin point near the water, Lamparilla Street intersected with several heavily trafficked arteries of the walled city. Calle Mercaderes and Oficios were two of the city’s founding streets and connected important plazas and government houses. This eastern edge of Havana near the bay was a vibrant commercial centre that housed some of the wealthier residents of the city. On calle Mercaderes, merchants offered wool cloth, linen, silk and gold for sale.Footnote 3 Adjacent to the port, blacksmiths, silversmiths, foundry workers, carpenters and ship caulkers practised their trades servicing Spain’s military and commercial fleet and their related economies (see Figure 1).Footnote 4
Plano de la ciudad y puerto de La Habana, 1838. Courtesy of Cuban National Archives (ANC).
But Margarita had fled from one of the cuadras (city blocks) nearer to the wall, on the opposite side of the city from the port, and her experience of Havana would have been shaped at least in part by this locale. Street name usage in Havana has historically alternated between official and colloquial names.Footnote 5 Calle Lamparilla for example, would come to be known colloquially as de la carcel and de la carcel vieja,Footnote 6 because until 1835 the street extended west from the old jailhouse.Footnote 7 Similar naming practices extended to Havana’s neighbourhoods and reflect the familiarity with which African-descended people traversed the city. The eight officially named intramural neighbourhoods of El Angel, San Agustin, La Merced, El Cristo, Monserrate, Santo Domingo, San Juan de Dios and Belén, became (respectively) Cangrejo, Pluma, Campeche, Legía, Doce pares de Francia, Estrella, Granada and Curazao.Footnote 8 For centuries, the plurality of street and place names has confused visitors and made documentation difficult for scholars unfamiliar with the city and its various mutations. It also suggests the concurrent ways that urban space is experienced while providing insight into geographies articulated through the interventions of African and African-descended residents. Calle Lamparilla’s official name carried a mythology of its own. The name ‘Lamparilla’ had been taken from a votive candle that remained lit in at least one of the houses and which signalled spiritual or devotional practices now lost to the street’s history.Footnote 9
Havana was a multivocal place, but Margarita appears singularly in the historical record as an enslaved fugitive. The runaway slave ad published in the Diario de la Habana focused on details that would ensure her re-capture by colonial officials; she is described as ‘una negrita conga’,Footnote 10 approximately 14 years of age, and ‘de color muy negro’.Footnote 11 The newspaper notes that she had been dressed in a white and blue checkerboard tunic and a white headscarf.Footnote 12 There is no mention in the newspaper of how long Margarita had lived on calle Lamparilla. There is no information that tells us whether she was familiar with the city and its nineteenth-century rhythms, though the presence of churches, plazas, public buildings and squares, like the public observance and celebrations of religious traditions of both Catholic and African origin and the diversity in the city’s population, would have made Havana legible to its vast array of residents, Margarita included. The global transformations that gave rise to Havana as a slave port must be understood in relation to local landscapes and their built and natural environments, as the editors of this volume note. In Havana, global transformations were shaped by internal Black ecologies on which scant literature exists, despite the presence of enslaved and free African and African-descended residents of the city through Havana’s colonial history.Footnote 13 At the height of the nineteenth-century slave trade to Cuba from the 1790s through the 1820s, between 225,000 and 315,000 enslaved people were brought to Cuba.Footnote 14 Of the people who remained in Havana, many were women and girls and some, like Margarita, were newly arrived to the city as a result of both the legal and illicit transatlantic and local slave trades that were active through much of the nineteenth century. Newly arrived and existing African-descended residents were thus exposed not only to the diverse demography of Havana but also to the ways in which the life of the port influenced the city. Black soldiers, some of them local to Cuba and others who were part of the ‘Atlantic creole’ diaspora described by Ira Berlin and Jane Landers, made up Havana’s milieu while stationed at port.Footnote 15 As Laura Rosanne Adderley notes in her work on liberated Africans in the Caribbean, the British Royal Navy was an active presence in Havana.Footnote 16 The HMS Romney that would later be stationed in the harbour, for example, not only housed African and Anglo-African soldiers beginning in 1837, but also liberated Africans (emancipados). The implications of the demographic mixtures present in the port city were several. Liberated slaves, Black British troops and men and women with experience in the various empires of the colonial Caribbean were an example of Black freedom attained through Atlantic mobility that rested on movement across bodies of big water. For enslaved subjects like Margarita, however, who entered a tangled geography of ever-changing jurisdictions and legal freedoms, her ability to flee from slavery was predicated, at least in part, on acquiring an understanding of Havana and accessing the city in ways that remained elusive to colonial administrators.
This article offers a fugitive reinterpretation of Havana pieced together through fragments of information found in both primary and secondary sources. Margarita’s momentary appearance in the historical record offers an opportunity to imagine and render visible the Black and heavily African city that lies inside of archival silences. It provides us with a fleeting opportunity to enter Havana from her point of departure and in the wake of the multiple processes constituting the global, urban port and the intimate geographies of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century city.
Margarita’s intramuros
Port cities are places of arrivals and departures. Six months before Margarita’s disappearance, the British captured the slave ship Firme before the vessel could disembark the 485 captives the ship had carried across the Atlantic.Footnote 17 As a result of an earlier 1817 treaty, Spain had agreed to the search of vessels suspected of transporting slaves in violation of the prohibition against Spanish subjects engaging in the transatlantic trade. Bi-lateral courts were created to adjudicate suspected cases of transatlantic slaving, and the Firme was charged with and then condemned for illegally transporting enslaved Africans.Footnote 18 The courts determined that the brigantine (though the Spanish called it a goleta, or a smaller schooner) had carried enslaved people from the present-day regions of Benin and Togo, including 100 children.Footnote 19
The arrival of the Firme is part of a broader history that underscores Cuba’s reliance on African-descended labour and its relationship to the port. In 1543, Havana became the designated port for ships returning to Spain and that, in turn, convinced the Spanish empire to fortify the city and secure the city’s deep-water harbour from competing empires.Footnote 20 From that moment on, Black labour, both enslaved and free, built the colonial city. The crown made it a practice to use royal slaves or rent slaves from residents for the purpose of construction and fortification work in and around Havana, and its investment was a profitable one.Footnote 21 The continued importance of the city’s natural harbour and the crown’s willingness to safeguard the city meant that even after the crown’s attention shifted to the American mainland and Spanish naval power waned, Havana remained crucial to colonial operations.Footnote 22 By the seventeenth century, Atlantic concerns drove amurallamiento, or the process of enclosing the city with walls, as the crown pursued militarization as the strategy to protect Spain’s American possessions. The presence of other European empires in the Caribbean and the fracturing of Spain’s colonial holdings, for example, as evidenced by the loss of Spanish Jamaica to the British or ceding the western half of Hispaniola (Saint-Domingue) to France in 1697, reflected Spain’s precarious position within shifting geopolitics. Distance and travel time, demographic decline and economic interests drove Spanish colonial settlers in American territories to look towards competing empires to meet their increasing demand for goods, and this included slaves.
An emphasis on population growth, along with greater trade regulations and the economic exploitation of Cuban lands, allowed the crown to reformulate the relationship between slave labour and colonial wealth in Cuba. The establishment of the Havana Company in 1740, for example, was supposed to counter the growing economic importance and impact of the Dutch East India Company (though it was unable to break the pattern of illegal trade in the Caribbean and fell woefully short of meeting import demands for residents). Meanwhile, large-scale sugar cultivation and slave imports in Barbados, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Jamaica and French Saint-Domingue increased royal revenues for competing empires while Spain’s economy in the Caribbean stagnated. By the time the Seven Years’ War culminated in the 1762 loss of Havana to British forces, Spain had already begun to re-evaluate colonial policies and see the city as a dynamic port sustained and fuelled by an economy undergirded by Atlantic slavery.Footnote 23
Several factors contributed to the nineteenth-century rise of sugar and slavery in Cuba, but the revolution in Saint-Domingue definitively altered the trajectory of Cuba’s economy by shifting sugar production to the island. Slave imports increased alongside the cultivation of sugar, coffee and tobacco and Havana became the principal point for the disembarkation of African slaves during the legal transatlantic slave trade from 1790 to 1820.Footnote 24 Slavery in Cuba, however, was expanding at the same time that the institution was coming under attack by the British abolition movement. After the 1820s, slave imports to Cuba relied heavily on clandestine channels and the local inter-American trade. Even with the restrictions, however, the sale of African slaves (as opposed to criollo, or American-born, slaves) would not diminish until after 1845.Footnote 25 By that time, the urban world that Margarita had entered would have gone through various unalterable transformations.
But in 1829, the African slave trade was still active despite the existing treaties. The penalty for illegally trafficking in slaves was the seizure and sale of a ship, and this was the reason behind the seizure of the Firme. The case became a source of diplomatic tension between Spain and Britain. Correspondence between colonial officials produced a trove of archival documentation. Boxes of documents now housed at the British National Archives in the records of the Foreign Office contain bundles of letters that representatives of both governments amassed as the case progressed. They include everything from news coverage directly related to the case to the most mundane of references to the ship. In one of these bundles – the product of an illicit and thwarted slave ship’s arrival to Cuba and its capture in Havana – the story around Margarita’s departure from Lamparilla Street begins to emerge.
The first and only archival mention of Margarita is found in the newspaper Diario de la Habana. The Havana paper published regular updates on matters of economic and political importance in the city and contained shipping news and announcements on land and property for sale. A tiny reference to the developing legal case of the Firme on 15 January is what prompted British officials to include the newspaper in the bundle of papers they sent to the UK. Under the section on Property, the newspaper published the runaway slave ad with news of Margarita’s disappearance, thus intertwining her archival presence with that of the Firme and underscoring the interdependency of the city’s economies, increasingly reliant on slavery, and the lived environment and geographies of its residents.
The intramural city encompassed roughly 2.14 kilometres and extended southward and west from the entrance of the harbour. The city walls had been incrementally built between the late seventeenth century and early nineteenth century, with the bulk of construction taking place between 1693 and 1760. Nine gates ringed the city’s perimeter to facilitate access to the city and its extramural barrios. After more than a century, litigation over the colonial encroachment on private property precipitated by construction of the walls was still ongoing, and the concerns that planners and engineers had raised decades earlier over enclosure were proving true. An exploding population with commercial and other ties to the city’s outlying areas was testing the infrastructure of the city and rapidly expanding outside of its gates. Havana experienced several dramatic population increases beginning shortly after the British occupation of the city, when registers show the population almost doubling from 22,828 to 42,805 between 1755 and 1810.Footnote 26
The administration of the marqués de la Torre, the Cuban captain general between 1771 and 1777, significantly shaped urban Havana, and this would have been a defining transformation for the city Margarita knew. Already the previous administration had initiated construction projects to refortify the city in the wake of the 1762 British attack that had changed residential patterns and increased surveillance in the city. Now, the marqués de la Torre was tasked with extending those projects while also instituting urban and public works projects that altered existing relationships to land and urban space. A new house numbering system was implemented that began on the northern side of the city and extended from the eastern area around the port.Footnote 27 The changes to standardize the urban landscape were also efforts to ensure the safety of the city by increasing the oversight of Havana residents.Footnote 28 This was important because despite the numerous changes that affected land-use patterns or social demography, the physical configuration of the city remained intact, allowing individuals to carve spaces of refuge from Havana’s geography.
What Margarita’s disappearance from the colonial grid illustrates are the limitations of colonial technologies aimed at social control. Padrones and census-like registers, as well as the tracking of lodging houses and the use of watchmen, inspectors and other colonial functionaries, failed to keep up with the city’s ever-changing ecologies. In contrast to the linear representation of urban development in early Spanish American and Caribbean cities that assumes creolization and European logic, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Havana contained an exploding but unknowable number of people, many of these young women and children recently arrived in the city, who in turn reconstituted Havana’s geographies.Footnote 29 Only five years after the city became the primary port for Spanish ships in the sixteenth century, the number of Black and indigenous slaves in Havana already outnumbered European settlers. Negros horros (emancipated Black settlers) could be land-holding residents of the city through the seventeenth century, as could indigenous residents in segregated barrios.Footnote 30 By 1607, the city held 6,400 residents and of these, 3,100 – or 45 per cent of its population – were classified as non-white.Footnote 31 This early information on the racial diversity of the city is followed by decades and centuries of figures fraught with inconsistencies. Keneth Kiple, writing on the problems that plague an accurate accounting of the Cuban population, summed up three main issues affecting population counts for Cuba. First, the plethora of official and wildly disparate numbers on the enslaved and free Black population of Havana has allowed scholars to compose opposing arguments using the same statistical sources.Footnote 32 Second, official census figures are ambiguous and often contradictory. And lastly, many of the original records have been lost and only the republished figures survive in secondary colonial sources, which now serve as the primary source of information.Footnote 33
The first official census to exist in Cuba was Bishop Morell de Santa Cruz’s in 1774. That census count notes that half of the island’s population made their residence in Havana and that Havana contained 77,152 people in the city and its cercanías. Footnote 34 This latter designation is a reference to the political divisions that abounded in and around the city (as on the island as a whole) and is important because jurisdictions were tied to population count.Footnote 35 ‘Havana’ was not a static or reliable unit of measure for much of the city’s history; its population was alternately counted as ‘Havana and the extramuros’, ‘Havana and its cercanías’Footnote 36 and ‘Havana’, which for most of the eighteenth century consisted of only the intramural city. Parroquias (parishes) and districts also organized and subdivided the city. The literature, however, has not addressed the impact that the legal urban body had on shaping demographic accounts. The numbers are ambiguous and contradictory in part because Havana was a kaleidoscope of jurisdictions that affected the ways in which officials – at least some of whom were themselves newly arrived from Spain – accounted for Havana’s residents.Footnote 37
The numbers obscure the presence of African-descended people and the geographies in which they moved. By the 1820s, the free Black population of the intramuro had expanded outward from the bay, and visitors to the city often commented on the number of free and enslaved people of African descent who moved in and about Havana. Reflecting on the urban milieu, Hippolyte Garneray’s watercolour Vista de la Plaza Vieja o Mercado Principe de la Habana, that hangs in the Museo de Bellas Artes in Havana, paints an urban setting in which four Black women sit and comb each other’s hair in one of the intramural plazas as people linger or conduct work on the outskirts of the scene.Footnote 38 The visibility of Black women in Havana’s public spaces stood in stark contrast to that of upper-class white women especially whose movement was constrained or closely guarded. While this has ostensibly been understood as a move to safeguard familial honour by restricting who had access to elite, Spanish and criolla women, the physical environment of Havana intramuros also played a role in women’s ability to traverse the city. Streets could overflow with mud and water, and women might be physically carried through the intramuros to avoid the swampy conditions even before volantas (two-wheeled carriages) were popularized in the nineteenth century. The construction of promenades in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries further restricted women’s movement even as – and precisely because – they provided avenues of circulation away from the densely crowded streets of the intramuros. The Alameda de Extramuros, built in 1772 outside of the city walls, for example, would become a designated space of recreation where women in carriages could take part in social activity.Footnote 39
Consensus exists around the impact of the port on the demographics and environment of the city. In the census by Morell de Santa Cruz, as in the subsequent numbers published by visitors to the city, the population of Havana almost doubled (from 35,000 residents of the intramuros to over 50,000 in the census) when naval crews, soldiers and military and religious travellers that called at port are taken into account.Footnote 40 During the eighteenth century, ships travelling from the Americas to Spain would offload cargo and await favourable conditions in Havana, often for months at a time when the city would become a hub of commercial and naval activity. The changes in the city would have been palpable: African-descended residents, enslaved and free, engaged in various service economy trades and in employment associated with the port. Through the middle of the nineteenth century, free African-descended men worked mostly as day labourers, carpenters and construction workers, and in commerce.Footnote 41 For African and African-descended women, opportunities existed in the service industry but also as nodrizas and parteras, or wet nurses and midwives. In Havana when the first school for midwives opened in 1828, the school provided an opportunity for women to officially register and continue to practise the skill. In the intramuro streets of Obrapia and Jesús María, women advertised their services to other women. And while regulations required women to be either married or widowed in order to practise midwifery, young and single women also registered as midwives, to say nothing of those who practised clandestinely.Footnote 42
On the day she disappeared, it was into this milieu that Margarita had either chosen or been compelled to flee. Traffic from residents transacting business would have been high both inside and outside of the walls. Other details of the city help flesh out her experience. If she indeed fled outwards from the intramuros, she might have headed out of the walled city, where she would have emerged in less closely guarded environs. Outside of the walls, streets were interrupted by farms and the remnants of woods and wild brush that remained uncleared and that hinted at the dense forests and swamplands native to the area. On the northern and western edges of the city, the two original gates in and out of Havana still existed. The Puerta de la Punta, on the northern end, and the Puerta de Tierra still served as the city’s main entrances. They were placed on the north and west sides of the wall to account for residential settlement patterns in the extramuros, and to facilitate the economic transactions associated with the port.
By 1829 when Margarita fled, the extramural city contained several distinct barrios, and comisarios de barrio, or neighbourhood watchmen, were limited to enforcing colonial law in the areas that fell under their jurisdiction. In the western and north-west extramuro barrios of La Salud, Guadalupe and especially of Jesús María, the demographic boom that Havana had experienced at the close of the eighteenth century and during the early decades of the nineteenth century had transformed caserios into residential barrios akin to neighbourhoods but that still remained distinct from the legal urban body.Footnote 43 This meant that by the time that Margarita disappeared, the most heavily surveilled areas of the city were those adjacent to the port. Inside the walled city, Lamparilla Street was a line of demarcation. To the east of the house from which Margarita fled stood the once-prominent markers of colonial Havana; the San Francisco convent and its adjoining plaza opened to the port and revealed the staging area where Spanish convoys replenished their supplies before making the return journey across the Atlantic. European rivalries and the waning of Spanish military power in the early eighteenth century, however, had caused the colonial administration to focus on modernizing its American colonies, and thus Havana’s urban squares and buildings had been reconstructed and repurposed to meet the needs of a Caribbean economy.
The Plaza de San Francisco that bordered Lamparilla Street had housed the city cabildo (the municipal city council, not to be confused with Black mutual-aid societies), the customs house, the jail and the Franciscan convent that lent the area its name. These sites had been developed from the swamplands that in the late sixteenth century dominated the area around the harbour. It had subsequently become a coveted living area during the height of Spanish naval power. Plans for the Franciscan convent and the adjoining plaza were laid out in the late sixteenth century. A series of hurricanes badly damaged the convent between 1680 and 1694, and it was renovated and reinaugurated in 1738. The city cabildo and jail were also housed in the plaza until 1768, when another hurricane severely damaged both structures. The cabildo and jail were then relocated a few blocks northward, centralizing colonial functions in the northern area of the walled city. As Spain’s transatlantic power waned and convoys became ever more irregular, the plaza became the site of slave disembarkations and the location of the marketplace that serviced the city and its extramural barrios. By the end of the eighteenth century, the ‘Palacio de los Gobernadores’ that housed Havana’s governing body and the jail were relocated to the Plaza de Armas, the military square north of the waterfront. By 1829, the convent had fallen into disrepair and was being used as a lodging house for indigents who included the destitute widows and the children of lower-level colonial functionaries.Footnote 44
To the west of where Margarita fled and away from the direction of the institutions near the harbour and bay, the streets were typical of the walled city in almost every way imaginable; Lamparilla Street had been laid out by military planners and engineers specifically to connect the city’s important institutions and connect these to the port. But Lamparilla Street, while also similarly symmetrical and oriented towards the bay as other streets were, had various distinguishing characteristics. Besides once connecting to the old jailhouse, the street now connected the bay to the Church of Santo Cristo del Buen Viaje. That church, the Holy Christ of Buen Viaje, or ‘Safe Voyage’, was dedicated to sailors and other travellers who would pay homage upon their arrival in Havana or went there to pray for safe passage as they prepared for their return home or travels elsewhere. Its adjacent plaza served as a congregating place for the free African-descended women who attended mass and offered laundry and other services to Havana residents.Footnote 45
Regardless of the direction that Margarita took that Monday in January, she would have had to negotiate a growing number of vendors and traffic before emerging outside of the walls, if indeed she left the city. That day, the sun had risen at 6:37 a.m. and the city gates would have opened at sunrise to facilitate traffic.Footnote 46 If she left early that morning she could have feasibly made the journey south or south-west and reached a safehouse before nightfall. That Margarita headed to the extramuro south-west of Havana is certainly a possibility. Travelling north or east towards the port or harbour would have exposed her to an area of the city with a heavy colonial and military presence. The slave barracones were also located outside of the walls to the north and west, and this would have almost certainly meant more surveillance. To the east, the seaside corridor of Havana still housed many of the city’s colonial institutions in 1829. If she headed west, her journey outside of the walls would have ended abruptly at the boundary line of private estancias, or construction for the new promenades outside of the walls, making that route a risky venture.Footnote 47 Farther south and outside of the walls, the neighbourhoods of Jesús del Monte and Cerro might have provided Margarita with an opportunity to remain free. These centuries-old neighbourhoods were governed as entities separate from Havana, even after the legal unification of the city. Taking refuge in any one of those areas would have placed her outside of the juridical reach of many of Havana’s administrators.
In the early nineteenth century, the Spanish crown had issued a royal decree expanding the powers of the Cuban captains general. Francisco Dionisio Vives (1823–32), and later Miguel Tacón (1834–38), were able to leverage the royal order into another development boom for the city that also heightened colonial policing across its barrios and that corresponded with another dramatic population increase registered in both the 1817 and the 1827 census.Footnote 48 Regulations that governed the parcelling and development of land and the creation of new spaces were also introduced during this period, though construction reached the city intermittently and unevenly as Tacón’s administration emphasized projects in public areas that increased the visual appeal of the city.Footnote 49 What the new regulations did do, however, was blur the distinction between extramuro development and the intramuro city. Black mutual-aid societies known as cabildos de nación, for example, evolved from religious brotherhoods to lay mutual-aid societies organized around ethnic or linguistic lines. Cabildos catered to free, African-born residents, though enslaved, free and criollo members also existed. Scholars have generally approached cabildos as showcasing both cultural ties to African ethnicities as well as the diasporic creation of ethnic identity within slave societies.Footnote 50 For decades, Black cabildos fought expulsion efforts by the city, and acquiesced to early nineteenth-century demands that houses be located outside of the walls. It is unclear whether a formal expulsion order was issued and systematically enforced, though many of the societies’ sudden moves suggests that this was not an entirely voluntary decision.Footnote 51 Black cabildos often rented out rooms or entire houses to city residents, celebrated feast days and provided social and political meeting spaces, drawing Black residents into the barrios they were located in. Matronas, or women who oversaw the cabildo and were responsible for its material belongings, could also be powerful members of Havana society.Footnote 52
Spanish rule and its corresponding organization of space across centuries of development helped shape the colonial landscapes from which Margarita fled. In an ironic twist, the remnants of the old convent on the Plaza de San Francisco in whose direction the young girl likely fled from, was rebuilt during the early nineteenth century to house the first iteration of the Cuban National Archives. The maps, plans and census records that functioned as technologies of colonial power and which were contained in this once heavily trafficked area have allowed scholars to recreate Havana’s multiple geographies from the fragmentary evidence left behind.Footnote 53 Writing on the function of the archive, Achille Mbembe notes that it presents the fragments of time that historians assemble into stories that then acquire coherence through their ability to create links between a linear beginning and end.Footnote 54 Within these fragments of time, ‘there will always remain traces of the deceased, elements that testify that a life did exist, that deeds were enacted, and struggles engaged in or evaded’.Footnote 55 The scale and vantage point from which we examine the city is thus an important aspect of urban analysis: from the port, the visual image of Havana is one oriented towards the city’s Atlantic processes. From the intramuros, the city looks outward towards the harbour before its footprint shifts west towards what would become the lush, garden-districts of Vedado. These are also the same spaces where North American influence would find its most receptive audiences after the end of Spanish colonialism.Footnote 56 While they may not be visible on the colonial map, the geographies of slavery and fugitivity emerge alongside the familiar images of colonial Havana and through the exchanges produced by Spanish and British officials during the nineteenth century, though the whereabouts of the young women and girls who fled from urban slavery remains elusive. In January 1829 alone, newspapers advertised the sale of enslaved men and women across the intramuros streets of San Ignacio, Mercaderes, Inquisidor, Amargura, Villegas, San Isidro, Obrapia and Compostela, creating a fleeting snapshot of its enslaved geography and of young women and girls who routinely absconded from the colonial grid and its corresponding archive (see Figure 2).Footnote 57
Arsène Lacarrière-Latour, Plan de la ciudad de la Habana, 1825. Image from the holdings of the Biblioteca Nacional de España.
Conclusion
I began this article with Margarita’s departure from calle Lamparilla, her deliberate disappearance from the colonial urban landscape and her subsequent re-emergence in the colonial archive in order to rethink the relationship between Black freedom and the colonial port city. Within the colonial geography of Havana, the echoes of lives like Margarita’s have material traces.Footnote 58 Reconstituting the spaces and conditions that Margarita would have encountered allows us to understand how the port organized the colonial city and conditioned the circumstances around her enslavement and eventual disappearance. The factors external to Margarita that might have shaped her decision to flee were several. Over half of the slave trade to Cuba at this juncture was composed of women, and after the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, prices especially for young women of child-bearing age increased.Footnote 59 Inside of the city, young women were valuable for their reproductive labour. They were sought after as wet nurses in private homes as well as in Havana’s casa cuna, the foundling home where slave owners could hire out enslaved women for lucrative sums.Footnote 60
Not only was movement by African-descended people commonplace, but the impediments to flee were built into the architecture of the city just as much as they were facilitated by the way people negotiated its geographies. Ironically, free Black and enslaved people’s ability to navigate and negotiate the spaces of the intramuros and extramuros would not in itself have raised the brows of comisarios de barrio and other members of the colonial government’s policing forces. Margarita, for example, if she headed to the extramuros, might have readily made the journey to the extramural barrios of Jesús María and Guadalupe. The policing and oversight cabildos were subjected to, and the residential and commercial development of the area by the early decades of the nineteenth century, however, would have made her ability to hide difficult. Alternately, if she made the journey farther south to Cerro, Jesús del Monte or east across the bay to Regla or Guanabacoa, she would have had to negotiate a more difficult and at times more visible terrain. The fact that the city gates were closed until almost dawn – an effort at first to protect Havana from conquering empires but, arguably, to also maintain control of an increasingly diverse population – would have dictated how quickly she could travel the kilometres required. And unless she had planned the endpoint of her journey, she would have been unable to rent a room in a lodging house or in a private residence without providing the necessary paperwork that colonial regulations demanded.Footnote 61
After the 1840s, Margarita’s urban world would have looked considerably different. Marble statues would have lined Havana’s paseos where farms, ‘caña brava’ or wild brush and cane thickets once stood. Under the administration of Miguel Tacón, roads were corrected and ‘reformed’ to create the wide boulevards of the present city. By 1865, an urban system of transportation more seamlessly connected parts of the city to one another. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the direction and lasting importance of urban planning to colonial rule in Cuba had not only been solidified but hastened by developments in the city. In 1844, the conspiracy of La Escalera further reinforced the relationship between Black ecologies and colonial unrest when administrators accused enslaved Africans on plantations in rural western Cuba of colluding with prominent and free Black urban residents to end slavery and colonial rule. Black residents were executed, tortured, imprisoned, banished or exiled, while avenues of Black upward mobility – like the Black militia – were quickly dismantled. While men have been the primary focus of many of the city’s histories, the urban worlds of slavery, fugitivity and women were inexorable bound together and would become ever more so as the century progressed. Through her work on the Escalera conspiracy, Aisha K. Finch has previously demonstrated how the rural plantation complex was intimately connected to urban areas.Footnote 62 Its networks included women and girls like Margarita who traversed the multivalent geographies of the city in both visible and fugitive ways.
In Havana, as in many of the port cities examined in this volume, global developments shaped local transformations, and in turn, local transformations and colonial subjects produced an environment difficult to discern from colonial sources. The port, as we see with the case of the Firme, shaped archival knowledge and the legible histories of the city. Margarita’s presence in census figures eludes us, including when we attempt to account for permanent, enslaved and transient residents and travellers through the city, because her presence was fleeting. The geography of the city and the corresponding colonial map nonetheless contain traces of lives that have eluded the colonial record and which, when allowed to reconstitute the city of Havana through its geography, refract a multisited locale that reveals the limits of colonial urban planning. Like all port cities, Havana’s landscapes were fluid and diverse. Here, I have proposed that we see the map as both text and archive. To do so means to recall Mbembe’s notion that to reassemble the past is to be preoccupied with ‘debris’, or the excess implicated in a ritual that ‘results in the resuscitation of life, in bringing the dead back to life by reintegrating them into the cycle of time, in such a way that they find, in a text, in an artefact or in a monument, a place to inhabit’.Footnote 63 The fragmentary evidence around Margarita’s life highlights the inextricable link between blackness, the built environment and urban spaces.
Acknowledgments
I want to thank the readers at the Freie Universität Berlin for their careful comments. I am also especially thankful to Lisa B.Y. Calvente for her continued help in thinking through Margarita’s world.
Open access
