Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery

Abstract

During the nineteenth century, the place and role of Afro-Americans in both Cuba and southern Louisiana underwent a phenomenal change. In this comparative study of the passage from slavery to freedom, Rebecca J. Scott explained that southern Louisiana and Cuba had many similarities because both slave societies had sugar-based economies. Her study further points out how, in both regions, former slaves stepped forcefully into public life after slavery ended in the second half of the nineteenth century. Overall, Scott found little fundamental difference between Louisiana and Cuba. While planters in Louisiana emphasized order to a greater degree, she convincingly argued that the realities of the two systems were not that far apart. She clearly asserted that the difference between the two societies was not at the heart of the plantation system but at the edges, as both shared the same markets, the same technology, and relied on coercive labor underlined by a similar brutality. Finally, in both societies the plantation system was challenged by internal conflict during the second half of the nineteenth century: by the Civil War in the United States and the anticolonial insurgency in Cuba. Although she traced a history with familiar contours, her approach was fresh.

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