In Trabajo portuario y segunda esclavitud en Cuba historian David Domínguez Cabrera reexamines the workers of nineteenth-century Cuba’s ports, melding a Marxian analysis of the transition from ancien régime to capitalist labor forms with the global labor history framework of the Second Slavery pioneered by Dale Tomich.Footnote ¹ The book grew out of a prize-winning dissertation completed in 2021 and was supervised by José Antonio Piqueras, who provides a prologue.

Scholars employing the Second Slavery framework have focused most often on the modernization of export agriculture rather than on urban work and workers. Domínguez rectifies this imbalance by employing the concept to better understand the evolution of urban work regimes in Cuban ports – mostly Havana, but also in newer sugar ports such as Matanzas and Cárdenas.

Additionally, Domínguez revisits early revolutionary-era Cuban scholarship on Africans and their descendants as port workers to ask if the conclusions of those historians still hold after decades of additional research and the benefits of a global labor history framework. Through his research in a wealth of archival, printed, and digital sources in Cuba, Spain, and beyond, he concludes that they largely do, with several modifications. A key change is seeing Cuba’s nineteenth-century sugar revolution based on slavery as an integral part of the global development of industrial capitalism. Domínguez accepts this premise and alludes to the global context, though in most of the book he digs deeply into the individual case of Cuba and the profound transformation of sugar transport and marketing in Havana’s port.

Another recent work – Daniel Rood’s The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery – has examined the transport and warehouse revolutions in Cuba (and Virginia and Brazil) employing the Second Slavery framework.Footnote ² Domínguez focuses more tightly on labor relations in the port and warehouses, while Rood makes a broader comparative argument about evolving racial ideologies, technological innovation, and managerial organization under the Second Slavery. Domínguez cites Rood several times but is most in dialogue with Pedro Deschamps Chapeaux, a Cuban historian of the 1960s and 1970s who pioneered research on people of African descent in Cuba’s economy and culture and to whom the book is dedicated.

Domínguez begins with an epigraph from Cuban historian Manuel Moreno Fraginals’ El ingenio, a work that remains fundamental even to current scholarship on the subject.Footnote ³ Moreno saw the sugar plantation complex as a totalizing force, molding class structures, physical spaces, and ideologies, with the institution of slavery retarding the development of fully capitalist relations of production. Domínguez and scholars of Second Slavery largely agree, though they diverge by arguing that the Second Slavery after the Age of Revolution (roughly 1760–1825) was integral to the development of industrial capitalism, not a semi-feudal remnant in contradiction to it. In Domínguez’s telling, the increasing numbers of enslaved laborers employed in Cuba’s ports (not proletarians) were “the gravediggers of the Old Regime’s labor order [ordenamiento]” in the mid-nineteenth century (p. 131).

Domínguez argues that the Second Slavery in Cuba was consolidated over the relatively short period from 1840 to 1860 through the rapid expansion of slave-based sugar production in new lands to the east and south of Havana, the importation of hundreds of thousands of coerced workers (enslaved Africans and indentured Chinese), and the increasing adoption of new technologies in production and transport. Steam power and mechanization revolutionized sugar processing and transportation by railroads and steam ships by the 1830s, allowing the spread of sugar far from its origins around Havana.

Domínguez closely examines the conflicts over work on Old Havana’s docks as Cuban elites tried to constrain the power of African-descended free men of color over the movement of goods in the port. The crux of his argument is that port work was homogenized and racialized over the nineteenth century as the Second Slavery consolidated. By focusing on port sites rather than a type of laborer, he is able to examine a fuller range of port workers – Africans and their descendants both enslaved and free, Chinese indentured workers, and free white workers – than other authors who have touched on this history.

In the first two chapters, he traces the structural changes accompanying the geographic expansion of nineteenth-century Cuban sugar production as its trade was increasingly connected to the Atlantic economy. The information in these chapters will be familiar to specialists in Cuban history as the author describes how the Spanish crown and Cuban elites reordered the island’s commercial relationship with the metropole. Though trade was liberalized, Domínguez shows the lingering impediments to efficient transport and the marketing of sugar products to port. Some of the impediments were physical – narrow, congested, cobblestone streets and animal-drawn carts in Old Havana. Additionally, when Spain reclaimed Cuba after the British occupation in 1763 officials offered preferential access to port jobs to colonial militiamen of color and to seafarers (mostly white) who registered with the Royal Navy, creating another impediment according to the author.

Building on the scholarship of Deschamps and other Cuban historians, Domínguez begins with the militiamen. He agrees that privileged access to jobs led to the preeminence of African-descended men in the transportation of goods in Old Havana’s port. Domínguez expands on this point to argue that the privileges granted also militarized the organization of port work under foremen of color who were members of the colonial militia, conferring a new level of status on the work and the workers.

Free white workers who registered with the Royal Navy also had privileged access to jobs in the Royal Shipyard, as stevedores, and in coastal shipping. Domínguez notes that people of color were mostly absent from skilled jobs in the Royal Shipyard and in coastal navigation and transport. He infers a racial barrier from this absence since people of color were well represented in related fields outside of the Navy, such as carpentry, and argues that this racialization became more widespread from the mid-nineteenth century onward.

Similar to earlier studies, Domínguez discusses the decline in the number of skilled port workers of color following the Escalera Rebellion and its repressive aftermath (1843–1844). Colonial officials, merchants, and planters united to execute or expel leaders of the rebellion, expel people of color who came from abroad as adults, disarm the militiamen of color, and prohibit enslaved cartmen from working the docks. Domínguez adds the building of new warehouses and docks on the eastern shore of Havana’s bay in the mid-nineteenth century as another cause of the decline in the number of port workers of color. He argues that all these changes intensified a process of racialization and whitening of port occupations, constraining the access by free people of color to more skilled jobs and networks of information that had aided their economic mobility.

By the 1850s, the construction of new giant warehouses on the eastern rim of Havana’s bay had transformed the transport and marketing of sugar and “homogenized” labor patterns. In the sugar warehouses, “with their workforce reserves (free and captive)”, Cuban elites “optimiz[ed] the work regime in the city” (p. 131). According to Domínguez, the new warehouses became “port plantations” and the Second Slavery reached its zenith (pp. 175–176). Plantations and warehouses formed an integrated system, owned and/or financed by planter and merchant families, worked by a heterogenous group of free and enslaved workers and Chinese indentured laborers. Domínguez argues that the work regimen and mechanisms of control on plantations and in warehouses “contaminated other labor spaces” (p. 176), such as the docks of Old Havana.

In the final chapters, Domínguez shows that the full flower of Second Slavery was short-lived. Its dissolution was brought about by the financial panic of 1857 and an explosion and a fire in several warehouses in the late 1850s and early 1860s. Efforts to rebuild were costly and saddled warehouse owners with crushing debt. Then, in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the socio-economic context of the plantation economy was completely transformed as enslavement was undermined and finally abolished. The illegal slave trade to Cuba ended in 1867, the trade in Chinese indentured workers in 1874. In 1868 the first of Cuba’s independence wars broke out, recruiting free, enslaved, and indentured people to the fight. In response, the Spanish government initiated gradual slave emancipation in 1870, with legal freedom finally achieved in 1886.

Domínguez’s analysis shows the totalizing power of the plantation complex, as well as the resilience and adaptability of the slave system, though the author highlights the former more than the latter. For example, his evidence for the homogenization of work in the warehouses is stronger than that for the docks of old Havana, which retained broader participation of people of color in varied, skilled jobs into the 1860s.

This is a book for scholars and graduate students who will find much to admire both in method and argument. Domínguez shows clearly the force of modern capitalist practices in eroding previous labor norms, though the transformation was uneven, contingent, and variable, even in the localized site of Havana’s port, as workers both coerced and free struggled for greater control of their working lives.