Scandalous Scarcities: Black Slave Women, Plantation Domesticity, and Travel Writing in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

This article draws on the writing of North American and European travelers to illustrate the ways in which enslaved black women became central to Cuba's visions of colonial prosperity in the mid-nineteenth century. Such literature highlights the anxieties that plagued Cuban colonial elites as the slave trade consistently brought fewer African women than men to the island. As mothers, wives, and caretakers of domestic space, black and African women became critical to planters' dreams of continued wealth and stability. To further encourage this idealized culture of respectable domesticity, white Cuban elites erected slave cabins and barracks whose physical arrangements could increase slaves' compulsion to marry, and enhance managers' ability to survey and oversee the enslaved populations. Thus white Cuban elites hoped that enslaved women – and the ideas about marriage, home, and family such women were thought to inspire – would help to produce plantation regimes as orderly and disciplined as they were prosperous.