Modern media and racial capitalism share conduits. The underwater cables running twentieth-century financial speculation were laid over the earlier routes of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in a mapping that exceeds geographic rhyming (Price 2014, 17). Seb Franklin (2021) has claimed that the abstraction of racial capitalism anticipates and lives on in the abstraction of contemporary digitality. In 1830-1860s Cuba, industrial communications enabled capital’s expansion and intensification at the same time that the colonial state waged war on other forms of communication. We should understand Atlantic “communications”—that is, railroads, steam ships, and later telegraphs, but we can here smuggle in literature—as inextricable from the history of racialized slavery. But colonial repression (including censorship) in its very zeal betrays other forms and routes of communication, less well-archived but ever-present. These might be thought of as insurgent media working against the ends and times of slave-driven capitalism: drumming and dance; clandestine literatures; diverted postal shipments; appropriated transport.[1]
The first railroad tracks laid in Cuba in 1837 were literal extensions of the sugar plantations. Rather than connect established cities, as trains did elsewhere, Cuban railways were built solely to facilitate the movement of sugar from inland haciendas to the ports from which the commodity was shipped abroad (Zanetti and García 1998, 79). In the face of an emergent European beet sugar industry, Caribbean sugar planters were under pressure to increase production. Although Spain had signed a treaty with England in 1817 outlawing the trans-Atlantic slave trade (effective in 1820), large-scale kidnapping of African captives increased under the now “illegal” or clandestine slave trade, stolen labor to power the growing sugar industry.
This height of Cuba’s “second slavery”—characterized by massive plantations and new frontiers of commodity production within industrial capitalism—also produced a corresponding and unbroken flurry of anti-slavery insurrections, including the largest alleged anti-slavery conspiracy on the island, the 1844 “Conspiración de la Escalera.” The plot’s demise and prosecution led to the sentencing of almost 2,000 people, the murder of scores of enslaved and free people of color, the exile of hundreds of accused participants, and a temporary muting of Cuban letters.[2] Plácido (Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés), the island’s most prolific poet (and “mulato”), was executed for his alleged involvement. Juan Francisco Manzano, the accomplished poet and author of the only known Spanish-language slave autobiography, never published again.
But the relationship between writing and the communications facilitating the slave-driven industries was not one of simple antithesis, of expanding plantation logistics and eliminating the voices decrying them. On the contrary, the spheres of railroad concessions, plantation ownership, slave trading, and the lettered elite were nearly coincident. Domingo del Monte, accused of conspiracy during the Escalera and subsequently exiled in Europe, had in the 1830s been the singular force behind the first explicitly Cuban literature, hosting a tertulia or salon in his home when Spanish authorities disallowed to found a Cuban Academy of Literature.[3] Del Monte was also the son-in-law of one of the island’s most powerful slave traders and plantation owners, Domingo Aldama.
Del Monte was emblematic of slavery’s utter structuring of all aspects of society. Related by marriage to a vast slaving empire, he was also close to the British abolitionist Richard Madden, at whose invitation del Monte smuggled out Cuban anti-slavery literature, including Manzano’s autobiography, for an Anglophone audience. When in 1838 Del Monte hosted a reading of Anselmo Suárez y Romero’s sentimental anti-slavery novel Francisco. El ingenio, o las delicias del campo “everyone attending, including the author, were enslavers” (Moreno Fraginals 1960).[4] At times del Monte hosted his tertulia inside his father-in-law’s Havana palace, a building whose construction had been infamously interrupted by a revolt of enslaved Yoruba-speaking men conscripted to build it. Aldama ordered several of the men shot to death on the spot, making the Palacio Aldama a truly gothic haunt for a salon of anti-slavery literature... (Piqueras 2021, 141).
In 1837, Del Monte became a stockholder and secretary for the nascent Compañía del Ferrocarril de Cárdenas a Soledad de Bemba (Zanetti and García 40). That same year Gaspar Betancourt y Cisneros (El Lugareño), who would become one of the island’s best-known costumbrista writers, received a concession from Cuba’s Captain General to build a railroad from Puerto Príncipe to the port of Nuevitas (Zanetti and García 48). In 1837, El Lugareño also began publishing in a local newspaper “escenas cotidianas,” sketches of life in the region. The poet José Jacinto Milanés consulted with the Matanzas railroad (Zanetti and García 1998, 111). Cirilo Villaverde, one of Del Monte’s acolytes and eventually the author of the most important nineteenth-century Cuban novel, Cecilia Valdés o La Loma del Ángel (1882), penned a vignette about the new railway travel for the 1841 lithographic album Paseo Pintoresco de la Isla de Cuba.
El Lugareño, though connected to del Monte, was rather differently positioned. After living in Philadelphia for a year as a young man and traveling to Venezuela to meet with Simón Bolívar in search of support for Cuban independence, he returned to Cuba and eventually dissolved his plantation into plots he turned over to white farmers, to manifest the viability of abolishing the enslavement of Africans. El Lugareño’s Puerto Príncipe-Nuevitas line, unlike many others, was, then, designed to bring agricultural products from an inland city rather than from a plantation. Like other anti-slavery peers, his advocation for importing white Canary Island laborers stemmed principally from a desire to avoid the demographics (and implications) of a majority-Black nation like neighboring Saint Domingue, now Haiti.
By 1843 construction of the Puerto Príncipe-Nuevitas line had petered out.[5] To foment support for its extension, El Lugareño conceived of a “comparsa ferro-carrilera” for Puerto Principe’s 1846 San Juan carnival. The simulacrum was impressive: a mock train was built to run on wooden tracks that a carpenter quickly laid throughout town. The comparsa was an assemblage of groups representing the railroad’s capital, labor, and passengers: “La junta directiva.—El cuerpo de injenieros.—Id. De carpinteros y trabajadores.—Id. de accionistas.—Id. De pasajeros” (Cisneros y Betancourt 1846, 2). The junta directiva carried a flag painted with a locomotive and the motto Ferro carril, para bien comun. The engineering corps worked their instruments. Children played the parts of carpenters and railway workers, singing as they connected and disassembled tracks. Speculators were represented by young women singing a hymn. The passengers were six young girls in a car painted with the slogan “Generación ferro-carrilera", railway generation.
The unusual carnival was written up in local newspapers, and, pleased by the coverage, El Lugareño published a response that amounted to one of his own costumbrista escenas. In 1838 he had already published an escena about Puerto Principe’s San Juan carnival in which he complained of its lack of anything “ingenioso” (Escenas 48). Now, eight years later, he applauded the exhibit of “a railroad train and its movement,” a sight for “philosophers and costumbristas.” He invoked what had already become a clichéd trope of communications “annihilating” space when he wrote “El pueblo was able to admire the idea, made material by Fulton and Wats [sic], that annihilates distances, brings peoples together, obliges them to know each other, have dealings, love one another…” (Litvine; Betancourt y Cisneros 1846, 4). The ferro-carril represented a singular idea: “el movimiento,” that fount of “industrial life, progressive life” (1846, 4).
Movement. El Lugareño summoned a standard metaphor. Progress after all meant advancing through both space and time. Movement was, indeed, at the heart of industrialism: Sigfried Gideion famously wrote that mechanization “‘begins with the concept of Movement’” (Pasquinelli 2023, 5). But movement was also a site of struggle.
The comparsa ferrocarrilera’s musicalization of the railway—the engineer-children working their instruments—modeled what Betancourt y Cisneros rightly perceived as a “philosophy” of movement. Yet the mechanistic vision was rendered through a repertoire that referenced its undoing: in pre-Escalera Conspiracy Cuba, a majority of musicians were African-descended, perforce informed by a history of forced movement and movements against such movement (el Lugareño had already decried carnivals that sounded the fotuto, an indigenous-named, African-associated instrument) (Sublette 139; Betancourt y Cisneros 1950, 219). Fred Moten writes that “there is a kind of anti-instrument rationality that lends itself to a being-instrument. It moves by way of the instrument’s disruptive extension.” Only the musician who understands “some sense of the value of playing, of being played with, of being played, of being-instrument, of being-endangered, of mere being” can improvise wildly, or really move (Moten 2016, 140). The comparsa ferrocarrilera contains the instrument and the anti-instrument, the railway and the freedom born from being or having-been-instrument.
The historian Camillia Cowling has written on the “precarious mobilities” of the unfree workers who built and covertly used Cuba’s railroads in the 1830s. Not only captivity but forced mobility defined the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its afterlives. This forced mobility was enacted through the repeated, violent uprooting of communities, including moving work crews to lay railroad tracks. (Being sent to work on the railway was at times a punishment for enslaved people [Cowling 2023, 460.]) Some railroad workers were free, but crews were overwhelmingly made up of the enslaved, convicts, and “emancipados”[6] (Zanetti and García 1998, 123; Cowling 2023, 460).
Cowling, however, highlights the double-edged valence of mobility. The same lines whose construction pulled workers from their communities and furthered slave economies also enabled free and enslaved Black peoples’ circulation of news, information, and the production of what Cowling calls counter maps. The railroad was surely many things: a severance of kinship ties and hard work spiking rails beneath a sun shorn of cover on deforested sugar lands, but also a new vehicle to accelerate fugitive possibilities.
We know that workers rebelled against building tracks. Insurrections by enslaved railway workers in 1843 halted construction (García and Zanetti 1998, 44). 1844 laws forbidding wayward use or even the crossing of tracks suggest the railways were being used to liberatory ends.[7] Military archives document “crimes” of using the railroads to possibly circulate people or information (Cowling 2023, 462). In 1845, to give just one instance, the Comisión militar ejecutiva y permanente, installed in Cuba in 1825 to surveil and punish subversive activity, charged the “pardo” man Hipólito Roland with speaking “palabras subversivas” to a black man (likely a slave) who had been designated to work on the railroad at Villa del Cobre (Diario 1845, np). The danger of the subversive words circulating among railway crews and down the lines likely raised fears of steam-driven networks of conspiracy.
Despite these archival clues, however, there are vanishingly few accounts of how these amplified separations, surprising connections, or changing sensory experiences were felt by those who built or secretly used the railways. How might unfree railway workers have experienced the blasting of new tunnels through mountainous rock, for instance: as a conquest of nature akin to the voracious industrial monoculture devouring humans? Or as a route and symbol for escape?
Beyond enslavers’ relentless acts of sadism, industrial production itself was deforming phenomenological experiences of movement, of movements. In the three decades preceding the arrival of the first locomotives (later called trenes), Cuban sugar plantations employed the “French Train,” better known as the “Jamaican train” (tren jamaicano) to process sugar; as refining improved the Tren de Derosne and Trenes Cubanos were added (Pichardo 1970, 588). The tren jamaicano was a series of boiling cauldrons heated by a single fire in a plantation boiling house. As enslaved workers transferred the sweet liquid from the first receptacle to each subsequent pail, the water boiled off and the contents grew progressively more solid. Although it later came to denote “railroad,” in the first decades of the nineteenth century the Spanish word “tren,” like the French “train” from which it was derived, indexed a group of machines or instruments that create—as the Real Academia de Español dictionary defines it—“una misma operación o servicio” or a “ritmo con que se hace o se produce algo, especialmente si es rápido.” The RAE offers as a sample usage: “Era difícil aguantar aquel tren de trabajo.” It was enslaved people who worked the tren jamaicano, whose bodies were moved by the rhythm of production, who found it difficult to withstand the tren de trabajo.
In 1817—the same year Spain signed a treaty abolishing the trans-Atlantic slave trade—steam-powered sugar mills were introduced on the island. Now the enslaved worker had to “multiply infinitely the same material tasks, coupling his muscles to the steam pistons. The steam machine originate[d] a sustained milling rhythm” (Piqueras 2021, 112). By the 1850s plantations installed gas lighting to extend the sugar harvest into the night, illuminating the new nocturnal hells the lighting enabled (Piqueras 2021, 41).
The industrial technologies must have created new and terrifying apprehensions of time, among them the compressed, obliterated life remaining for an African enslaved on a plantation upon arrival in Cuba: an average some have estimated at seven years, even five (Knight 1970, 83). The devouring of life is ontologically linked to accelerated movement and surveillance enjoyed by leisure transit on the railways. But how this changed time registered is elusive. We may conjure a diabolical chiaroscuro of the gas-lit nighttime scenes, a flickering boiling house, bodies worked beyond survival, the requisite bell tower meting out schedules, looming over sugar processing structures. Still, the consumption of workers’ time and space is barely represented in historical, art historical, or literary records.
Certainly, we have documents of the sensorial and aesthetic changes for that figure which Jonathan Crary termed “the observer,” and which echo what Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1986) described for lettered classes in Europe and the United States. An 1842 newspaper chronicle about the Havana-Güines railroad meditated on the new perspectives and aesthetic experiences that the rails afforded travelers excited by speed:
a trip by railroad car will not be enjoyable for a painter who wants to rhapsodize [estasiarse], but the traveler, that man for whom the same view irritates him after five minutes … will find all he desires…In the cars one believes he has really traveled over a river, because focusing his gaze nearby, the speed … creates the optical illusion that grasses and plants, blurred by speed, fuse into a single group that seem to flow in an accelerated stream (Cáceres 1842, 2).
The author’s perspective on the landscape (of plantations and enslaved laborers?) is not picturesque or contemplative—not ecstatic, in the sense of outside of time—but a blur that dissolves solid land into speeding flow. Movement. But we need to turn to scraps from journalism and administrative files for clues to other movements working against the rhythms of both plantation and capitalist communications.
In his study of Black sonic modernity, Alex Weheliye cues Édouard Glissant to sum up a vast corpus (and commonplace analysis) of African-diasporic art in the Americas: “it is nothing new to declare that for [Black subjects] music, gesture, dance are forms of communication, just as important as the gift of speech. This is how we first managed to escape the plantation” (Glissant 1989, 248; Weheliye 2005, 38). In Cuba, colonial authorities suspected as much. Dance and drumming, well beyond the famed “talking drums,” were strictly legislated in Cuba. In 1681 Black people were prohibited from dancing in homes or cabildos (Barcia 2009, 61). A 1784 slave code required that dances by enslaved people on plantations be overseen by the hacienda economist or the hacendado himself, and prohibited people from neighboring plantations to mix (Lucena Salmoral 2000, 83).[8] Similar ordinances were issued periodically over the next hundred years.[9] In 1843 the Governor of Cienfuegos asked the Captain to ban “toques de tambor” for fear that “the slaves might make use of the drumming that they can understand to form groups or call a meeting” (Pérez de la Riva 1975, 34). In 1844, tangos—the generic term for African drumming and dancing—were banned for four years (Egüez 2016, 229). As late as 1913 the police banned comparsas from parading in the streets of Havana, using any instrument that even approximated the sound of the “African drum,” and moving to music (Ortiz 1992, 22; Sublette 2004, 322).
The early colonial bans were open attempts to disable communication technologies. Later costumbrista literature frequently addressed tangos and Día de Reyes (January 6) dances, rendering local color with racist horror. Although different in their goals and publics, the ordinances and the literature both proscribed how space and time should be used, how communication should happen.
The distinction should not exactly be understood, as E.P. Thompson wrote about the English working class, between “pre-industrial” seasonal notions of time and industrial clock time, however much the bell organized the plantation. Here, no crypto-Protestant mores were instilled, few workers sold their time. Instead of a factory floor, botanical harvests, like humans, were forced and multiplied, extended and distorted. We might see in the representation of dancing an opposition between human and more-than-human complexity and plenitude (Día de Reyes dances employed animal costumes and pantomimes and used plant fibers as central materials) and the mechanization of constrained, repetitive gestures—that is, of communication as the amplification of extractive processes. African dance in Cuba—alternately a means of military training, celebration, mourning and release, and social reproduction—not only served to palliate the corporal injuries of sugar work but likely also commented upon it (Farris Thompson 2005, 229).
Communications depend on signs and meaning, but also time. J. M. Andueza, Spanish author of an 1841 memoir about living in Cuba, included a long section in his book on the island’s “Comunicaciones,” by which he meant steamships and railroads. With admiration he concluded: “[c]uanta mayor sea la facilidad de las Comunicaciones, tanto más tiempo se ahorrará en la especulación,” underscoring how communications technologies facilitated credit, speculation, and other futures negotiations (1841, 121). Not for nothing was the group that extended credit to Cuba’s first sugar hacendados termed the “Junta de Temporalidades” (Cantero 2005, 23).
A majority of the Africans kidnapped and brought to Cuba came from West Central and West Africa, cementing the centrality of Kongo and Yoruba cultural, religious, and linguistic traditions on the island. Kongo concepts of time share a root with embodied movement, and specifically with tango, according to Kimbwandende Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau, a renowned authority on Kongo cosmology. Bunseki Fu-Kiau claims that the most common Kikongo word for time is ntangu, whose root is tanfa: “to count, put in order, accumulate, go into steps, go back and forth,” but also “to read or to dance, as with one’s own ntanga (feet/legs)…the names of the Latin American dance the tango and the Cuban dance the matanza are directly derived from the Kongo festival dance of Matanga” (1994, 21). Dancing is also a way of marking time, of accounting and recounting, of rendering a kind of history and creating another time (English-language poetry is also divided into “feet.”) Robert Farris Thompson even argues that Kongo dance is a kind of writerly sign system: “Kongo [w]riting with signs is a mark of distinction. Its vitality and pertinence spills over into dance. Some Kongo moves are signs” (2005, 68).
The railway generation—the generación ferro-carrilera—mapped counter geographies, too, and moved to counter times, hijacking, employing, and refuting a range of communications.