More than 30 years ago, Eric Hobsbawm began asking stimulating questions about banditry as a primitive form of social protest. Among the types of bandits, he maintained, peasant societies invariably produce what he called “social bandits,” i.e., “peasant outlaws whom the lord and state regard as criminals, but who remain within peasant society, and are considered by their people as heroes ... as men to be admired, helped and supported.” Recent scholarship on banditry largely consists of case studies that have agreed with, qualified, or rejected Hobsbawm’s arguments.
Schwartz sees her study of Cuban banditry in the 1880s and ’90s as a vigorous challenge not only to Hobsbawm but to Louis Pérez, Jr., who found social bandits in Cuba during the struggle for independence from Spain. Schwartz has mined the Polavieja Collection in the Archivo General de Indias for much useful and colorful information about various bandits. But I doubt that either Hobsbawm or Pérez would accept her stark rendering of their interpretations. They do not contend that all bandits were social bandits. They do not deny that in reality social bandits often fell far short of their heroic images. Schwartz seems to have missed—they are not cited in her bibliography—several of Hobsbawm’s responses to his critics. To say, as Hobsbawm has done, that social banditry is a “modest and unrevolutionary protest” would seem to deny Schwartz’s claim that “Hobsbawm’s bandit was, in essence, the vanguard of revolutionary and class consciousness for a prepolitical society” (p. 4). Pérez’s thesis on the connection between social banditry and the expansion of capitalist agriculture does not rest, as Schwartz implies, on Havana province alone, and, with the exception of the “patriot-brigand” Manuel García and a few others, his list of bandits is not the same as hers. Schwartz correctly notes that rural society in western Cuba was profoundly shaped by African slavery, and, thus, did not replicate the peasant villages of mainland Latin America. But western Cuba did have rural community, kinship, class, and racial ties that could foster social banditry. Schwartz says that “[p]rotest among slaves took many forms, but not social banditry” (p. 10). Maroons, however, certainly have many of the requisite features.
Gabino La Rosa’s research on Cuban maroons is well known to readers of the popular Cuban magazine Bohemia. This short book contains a wealth of statistics, including 61 tables and 12 graphs and maps, derived largely from records on runaway slaves compiled by the development council of the Havana Consulado during the nineteenth-century sugar boom. It shows distributions of captured runaways by month, year, and decade as well as by their sex, age, provincial origins, and ethnicity. Some of his figures hold surprises. For example, in a previous article La Rosa demonstrated a dramatic rise in the number of communities of runaway slaves from 1830 to 1840. Yet this book shows by far the largest number of captures occurring from 1800 to 1810, and the proportion of bozales was always quite small. Although La Rosa seems more comfortable in compiling statistics than in interpreting them, no better quantitative study of Cuban maroons exists.
