Pablo Tornero has written this study of colonial Cuba to help explain the historical causes of Cuba’s underdevelopment. He has selected the period from 1760 to 1840, because for him this era marks the origin of the island’s dependency, its monoculture, and thus its underdevelopment. The Cuban sugar plantation system, which Tornero claims came to fruition in the mid-nineteenth century, persisted until 1959. Based on thorough research in Spanish primary sources, Tornero shows how slavery, fed by the freeing of the slave trade from its formerly mercantilistic restrictions, developed as “the motor nerve” (p. 29) of the eighteenth-century Cuban economy. The greatly expanded Cuban slave trade, a feature of the island’s economy until after the U.S. Civil War, determined Cuba’s demographic and racial future up to the present.
In a very useful chapter, albeit limited to the period 1774 to 1817, Tornero summarizes the impact on Cuban demography of the huge influx of African slaves. He argues that Cuba’s demography was shaped by its economic structure, and shows how the slave population developed distinct demographic characteristics in the sugar-producing areas of the island. There, slaves constituted an overall majority, whereas in tire mixed agricultural areas they never exceeded 40 percent of the total population. In the mixed areas the percentage of female slaves was also considerably higher.
Tornero also is convinced, despite recent historiography to the contrary, that Cuban slavery endured until economic contradictions in both Cuba and Spain destroyed it. He views the debates over the end of slavery and the slave trade, beginning in 1811 and continuing through to the abolition of slavery in 1886, as almost indivisible in nature, pushed by an industrializing, expanding Britain, but resisted by a creole plantocracy determined to preserve slavery and the slave trade at all costs, and supported by Spain, caught in an obdurate rearguard action to protect its last imperial treasure. There is little room in this explanation for the many nuances brought on by changing nineteenth-century circumstances in each of the countries involved. The overarching conceptual frameworks are accepted and reinforced in this study, rather than subjected to the same rigorous analysis that Tornero brings to the demographic and economic data he uses.
Tornero echoes Manuel Moreno Fraginals in arguing that slave labor discouraged Cuban planters from utilizing modern technology, although he does believe that Spain should share the responsibility for keeping Cuba tied to a regime of slave production longer than might otherwise have been the case. He states that if Spain had possessed either industrial capacity or financial wealth, she could have provided the technology to modernize the Cuban sugar industry and bring an earlier end to slavery. Is this a realistic historical hypothesis resting, as it does, on the inevitable triumph of capitalism over slave production? The two are not as antithetical as Tornero would have us believe. Both capitalism and slave production in Cuba revealed greater capacity for adaptability and flexibility than some historians have been willing to admit. Tornero’s study is excellent in its detail of the transformation of the Cuban economy in the early nineteenth century, but he leaves plenty of room for further debate on the larger historical issues enveloping Cuba throughout the century.
