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A Transatlantic Slavery Narrative:
Work Sketches of a Nineteenth-
Century Bristolian-Cuban Sugarcane
Plantation and President Barack
Obama’s ‘Black Speech’ in Cuba
RAFAEL OCASIO, Agnes Scott College
This is a historic visit and it’s a historic opportunity to engage directly with the Cuban people and to forge new agreements, commercial deals, to build new ties between our two people. ——Barack Obama, Speech in Cuba After the triumph of the Haitian Revolution in 1804, Cuba emerged as the world’s largest producer of sugar through a complex commercial relationship with the United States as its most important buyer. This financial relationship was gained by means of a rather intricate web of US businesses that supported Cuban sugarcane plantations dependent on the labor of enslaved workers. An active slavery trade between Cuba and United States was based out of Atlantic Coast American ports. Though barely documented today, there was a close commercial relationship between Cuba and Bristol, a coastal Rhode Island town that was central to the transatlantic slavery trade. This industry prospered in spite of a series of antislavery trade regulations, beginning with the US Congressional Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves (1807), which, although intended to act as a blockage, failed to impede a highly profitable business that involved a myriad of supporting transnational partnerships. A notable US financial enterprise was ownership of sugar plantations.
280 Ocasio | A Transnational Slavery Narrative Bristolians owned sugarcane plantations in the Cuban province of Matanzas that produced molasses, that was then taken to Bristol for the production of rum. These rum refineries were also an important component of the slavery trade, as rum was used as a bargaining chip in the purchase of African enslaved workers, who were brought, in turn, to Cuba, as first point of arrival of the slave trade, followed by other US southern markets. Other side businesses operating from Rhode Island included the importation into Cuba of dried codfish and fabric for clothing for enslaved workers. 1 These relations of commerce between Cuba and the United States gave rise to numerous trips to the island by Americans involved in the business of cultivating sugarcane and sugar byproducts. Americans often visited Cuban ingenios , as sugarcane plantations were widely known on the island, either as tourists or as friends of landowners who gladly showcased these sites well known for their use of industrialized inventions. Technology, often American, supported the refinement of sugar molasses into sugar-related products. Americans also came to Cuba as technicians performing work on sugarcane plantations. Given the scarcity of historical sources concerning these transnational exchanges within the Bristol-Cuba trade, of significant historical importance within the Bristol–Cuba slavery trade is a work diary written by a Bristolian, George Howe, who provided managerial support on New Hope, a sugarcane plantation owned by well-known Bristol merchant, slave trader, and US senator James D’Wolf (17 64 – 1837). In his diary, written from Ingenio New Hope from May 1832 to February 1834, Howe wrote about a number of agrarian work practices predominantly performed by field enslaved workers. His views on enslaved work practices are today a window into an often secretive worksite, as publications about sugarcane ingenios were often censored in the Cuban press. The Travelogue as a Literary Testimonial After the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the tradition of letterwriting from Cuba by American travelers endured. The US congressional embargo went into effect in 1962, heavily restricting free travel between the United States and Cuba, though the embargo has been circumvented by selective American and international personalities for decades. Through their eyewitness accounts, Americans followed key events in the development of radical sociopolitical policies under the revolutionary government. Like the accounts of nineteenth-century travelers before them, these travelogues revealed the heightened politicized climate operating on the island as socialist policies addressed socioeconomic issues, some of which related to Cuba’s long imperialist history with the United States. Arguably, the most famous of American tourists visiting Cuba in the early years of this millennium has been Barack Obama. 2 The US president’s three-day official visit, beginning with his arrival in Havana on March 20, 2016, had an extraordinary impact on prospective diplomatic conversations surrounding the US embargo against Cuba. As
282 Ocasio | A Transnational Slavery Narrative mixed race.” 4 More importantly, Obama presented himself as intimately conversant with issues of race and class, points of contention in the diplomatic conversations pertaining to the US embargo. A Literature of the Plantation: The Ideological Narrative of a Cuban Sugarcane Ingenio George Howe (1791–1837), a Bristolian who had some administrative skills, came to oversee the operation of the Ingenio New Hope, a Cuban sugarcane plantation located in the emerging agrarian center of the province of Matanzas, on the northwestern coast of the island. Not much is known about Howe. He had attended Middlebury College and had literary aspirations. He wrote poetry profusely and, according to his own testimony in his diary, some of it was published in Providence Gazette.^5 Howe also wrote songs, eulogies, and political speeches. Key US national holidays, such as the Fourth of July, inspired some of his most patriotic speeches. The owner of Ingenio New Hope was James D’Wolf, a notable Bristolian businessman and politician, whose political machinations cleverly dealt with both US congressional prohibitions on the slavery trade and Cuban decrees regarding sugarcane ingenio operations. D’Wolf, today “remembered as the largest slave trader in the history of the United States,” had a central role in a thriving slave trade in the postindependence US.^6 He had guided several brothers into slave trading, operating a booming business since the 1780s that would ultimately become “the single largest slave trading family in the United States.”^7 As the worldwide sugar market increased in value throughout the nineteenth century, Bristol-based businessmen, including D’Wolf, who owned sugarcane and coffee plantations in the province of Matanzas, invested heavily in Cuba. In the United States, the slave trade network, as David W. Blight contends, sustained “systems of slavery operated largely as thoroughly legal practice, buttressed by local law and by the United States Constitution.” 8 The trade also required a complex organization of subsidiary businesses, such as “textiles, shipping, banking and insurance.”^9 Cuban sugarcane plantations owned and managed by notable Bristolian businessmen had international and financial significance with the result that large numbers of skilled Americans came to Cuba to perform diverse work tasks. Their interactions with Cubans today represent the first contact that the postrevolutionary US sustained as a rising Atlantic commercial and political powerhouse. The maintenance of ingenios required detailed documentation of operational practices, including personal observations, initially written as diary entries or work reports. Howe collected his personal letters and his labor reports as a formal literary travelogue, which he ambitiously entitled The Diary with Letters, Lucubrations, Dreams, Flim-flams, Cogitations, Whims and Fantasies of the Author. He wrote short, pseudo- scientific observations about the flora and fauna surrounding the “monte,” as the wilderness surrounding plantations was known and feared by city dwellers who found
Journal of Transnational American Studies 10 .1 (Summer 2019) 283 themselves unprepared for the rough rural conditions of sugarcanes. He also drew sample illustrations, rather detailed amateur drawings that might have been part of his conceptual project to publish the journal as a commercial travelogue. Unfortunately, Howe’s untimely death prevented his publication of the diary. The close involvement of Bristolians with slave-related businesses or Bristolian- owned ingenios in Cuba produced a flurry of written documentation, whether work reports or more personal documentation, such as diaries or epistolary correspond- ence. Indeed, large droves of Americans traveling to Cuba throughout the nineteenth century made this Caribbean island a popular destination, reflected in the large number of intimate personal diaries, some of them intentionally organized and published as formal travelogues. Howe closely followed the travelogue tradition, a genre that he was familiar with, given its popularity as a commercial enterprise. As would be expected, a central narrative component of a literature of the plantation centered around descriptions of slavery practices. Matthew Pratt Guterl has argued that the role of slavery-related travel experiences throughout the Caribbean had a notable ideological impact: “Slaveholders and slaves, masters and laborers of all sorts, journeyed across the American Mediterranean, each imagining a New World that still shared a great deal across national borders or that was bound together by wide- open circuits, trade routes, and intellectual connections.”^10 The degree to which the specifics of the slave trade were revealed, including the actual work practices on plantations, widely differed according to the individuals and their function within the numerous, and often criminal, tasks. Howe recorded a plethora of seasonal details pertaining to the cultivation of sugarcane and, proudly, his overseeing of the installation of a sawmill, a modern facility that supported a new business enterprise that aimed to import exotic woods to the United States. Howe did not, however, document details about slavery practices that he dealt with, nor did he reveal specifics about transactions of D’Wolf’s slave trading that would have been illegal since 1807, following the US Congressional Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves. He was likely torn on this humanitarian issue, given that he was also a member of the D’Wolf family. His mother, Abigail, was James D’Wolf’s sister. While he may have held conflicted views about his role on Ingenio New Hope, he was determined to do his job well, in spite of the rather harsh surroundings of the Cuban countryside and the hostile conditions operating at New Hope that for him became emblematic of bad business practice by the D’Wolfs. At the core of his ambivalent personal feelings regarding slavery was his belief that, though he knew slavery to be an oppressive system, enslaved workers were essential to the ingenio’s financial success and, therefore, his own well- being as an employee and close relative of the powerful D’Wolfs. Enslaved workers were very much on Howe’s mind, however. One of his art pieces in particular stands out today for its bold representation of Peter, Ingenio New Hope’s cook ( see Figure 1 ). Although Howe noted encountering Peter, he never specified the nature of their relationship. It was, however, strong enough that Howe
Journal of Transnational American Studies 10 .1 (Summer 2019) 285 A thin walking stick, which clearly could barely support the weight of a large, muscular man, emphasizes the subtle message that his arched legs could have been the result of a work accident on the field. But Howe remained silent about the origin of Peter’s disability, which did not prevent the use of his labor as cook. Perhaps in this elaborate portrait of Peter, Howe was exploring his activist feelings regarding the injustices and criminal acts that he witnessed at Ingenio New Hope. Nonetheless, Howe maintained a positive outlook on the role of New Hope as a remarkable financial investment and an outstanding technological operation. Writing in August 1832, some three months after his arrival in the province of Matanzas, Howe formally addressed a crowd of workers, including enslaved workers, at Ingenio New Hope. He was celebrating the conclusion of the construction of a sawmill whose operation he had come to supervise. He summarized his heightened expectations that his arduous physical work, as a supervisor of this modern construction, would have an impact beyond the economic remuneration. The sawmill would be part of the advanced technology, mainly American and British, that would turn Cuban ingenios into superb work sites. Thus, the sawmill indirectly became a symbol of the installation of new American technology on foreign soil. Figure 2. An artistic rendition by George Howe of New Hope’s steam sawmill. Image used by permission and courtesy of the Bristol Historical and Preservation Society, Bristol RI.
286 Ocasio | A Transnational Slavery Narrative Howe considered the sawmill an advanced piece of technology, a symbolic representation of superior US methods of production and, most importantly, an efficient work apparatus. Indirectly, it also represented a triumph for an American government aspiring to expand economically and politically into the Caribbean––and Cuba, in particular, which was viewed as an untapped frontier. Although the sawmill symbolized the triumph of modernity over the overwhelmingly wild forces of nature, the clear protagonists were men, whose herculean manual efforts brought to completion this Bristolian-designed machinery. Indeed, Howe did not document the presence of women workers, even as field enslaved workers performing duties of the various aspects of cultivation of sugarcane. Howe passionately applauded the efforts of all the men who were working at New Hope and, surprisingly, among them, the enslaved workers, whose representation in his work reports went beyond the usual voyeuristic depiction of individuals engaged in forced labor activities. Although Howe physically placed them in the field, he awarded them a strikingly sympathetic image: “Our Ebony friends who roll their billiard balls in wonder, as the work advances, and show their rows of ivory—give happy demonstrations of health and cheerfulness.” 11 In his characterization of African “Ebony” field workers, Howe certainly drew from the usual stereotypical physical depictions so common in popular art forms; however, he also described the laborers as exceptional workers in spite of exhaustive agrarian tasks: “Their docility at labor betrays no reluctance—their honest faces are charged with no accusation; whilst their posteriors, naked as heavenly Truth most eloquently reproach the neglect or miscalculation of their owners” (24). Those unnamed owners, perhaps Cuban and Spanish plantation owners whom Howe eventually came to despise as ineffective administrators, mistreated their hardworking enslaved crews. He pointed out in a matter-of-fact fashion that nearby enslaved workers lacked basic needs, such as proper clothing: “In sober truth, they are egregiously in want of trousers” (24). This would be Howe’s most direct critical attack on plantation owners, who, as his actual neighbors, spent only short seasons living in their ingenios, preferring the refined life of urban centers, such as Havana and the city of Matanzas. Unexpectedly, Howe’s speech praised enslaved workers, in contrast to white workers, for their hard work under dire conditions: “I am at a loss to imagine how with none but these poor negros [sic]—insulated from the arts and from all intelligent society—subject to inclement skies—subject to diseases—subject to other positive evils and to innumerable privations, he could so soon have ‘laid low the dark forests and tamed the features of the landscape!’” (24, emphasis in the original). Although the embedded reference to Washington Irving might be seen as an early indication that Howe intended to reduce the harsh elements associated with rural slavery to literary components, the scene is arguably significant as an open abolitionist statement: “It is very remarkable that admidst [sic] all these labors and sufferings, his people have been generally contented; still more remarkable that death has claimed but one” (24). Of notable importance was Howe’s determined effort not to label enslaved workers as
288 Ocasio | A Transnational Slavery Narrative ongoing in England in the 1790s, were “spearheaded ... especially by Quaker women’s antislavery organizations.” 14 And around the time of Howe’s stay at Ingenio New Hope in 1825, the Birmingham Female Society for the Relief of British Negro Slaves had called for “abstinence from the use of slave cultivated sugar … not only in our West India Colonies, but also in other parts of the World.” 15 Against this financial background of high-stake investments, the silences in Howe’s diaries are plentiful. Whether writing a work report to a representative of the D’Wolf administration or addressing a family member or a friend, he understandably refrained from discussions of the treatment of Ingenio New Hope’s enslaved workers. He neglected to dwell on references to New Hope’s hideously feared workers, such as the mayoral, a rather distrusted individual. In this self-imposed censorship Howe did, however, follow an approach similar to local writers, whose literary treatment of slaves on Cuban plantations could not include any reference to the particularly gory details of punishment practices. In his handling of specific details concerning his treatment of enslaved workers at Ingenio New Hope, Howe was in a difficult dilemma. He thus did not dwell on the behind-the-scene details of his managerial protocol of enslaved workers at New Hope. As the readers of his letters must have assumed, the intricate managerial details fell within the domain of the overseer, who was already documented in a rising Cuban abolitionist literature as a negative figure whose inhumane practices made him the most hated and despised administrator. Cuban abolitionist literature remained unpublished on the island, though. The powerful political machinery of an ingenio-based economy succeeded in silencing opposition to the horrors of slavery, including the publication of news about those terrible violations, situated at the core of operational practices, to the enslaved workers’ human rights. President Barack Obama as a ‘Black man’: A Modern Reading of the Impact of Slavery on Cuba’s Colonial History I can’t even hold up my experience as being somehow representative of the black experience (“After all, you don’t come from an underprivileged background,” a Manhattan publisher helpfully points out to me); indeed, learning to accept that particular truth—that I can embrace my black brothers and sisters, whether in this country or in Africa, and affirm a common destiny without pretending to speak to, or for, all our various struggles— is part of what this book’s about. ——Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father , xvi As it had during the illegal slave trade period, the current financial blockade of Cuba seems to invite mixed results. Its actual effect on the development of ideological
Journal of Transnational American Studies 10 .1 (Summer 2019) 289 policies is still highly contested. At the time of Barack Obama’s election in 2008, as William M. LeoGrande and Peter Karnbluh attest, his political handling of Cuba would become a “litmus test of Obama’s declared desire to forge a new ‘equal partnership’ with the region.” 16 Indeed, in his handling of the “Cuban case,” Obama signaled his administration’s prospective diplomatic approach toward Latin American affairs. Even before Obama’s election, Fidel Castro had targeted “the black candidate … nominated in the face of strong opposition” as a likely victor. 17 On May 25, 2008, Castro reminded Obama about the revolutionary programs which had taken place in spite of an imposed US economic embargo: “Before judging our country, you should know that Cuba, with its education, health, sports, culture and science programs, implemented not only in its own territory but also in other poor countries around the world, and the blood that has been shed in acts of solidarity with other peoples, in spite of the economic and financial blockage and the aggression of your powerful country, is proof that much can be done with very little. Not even our closest ally, the Soviet Union, was able to achieve what we have.” 18 After the election of Obama, Castro highlighted, as he had done with previous presidents, Obama’s inability to deal with the embargo, a point of contention that Castro frequently voiced as Obama’s weakest diplomatic fault: “Not a word was said about the harshest of measures: the blockade. This is the way a truly genocidal measure is piously referred to, one whose damage cannot be calculated only on the basis of its economic effects, for it constantly takes human lives and brings painful suffering to our people.”^19 Connecting Race to a Transnational Activism Like Howe and many other travelers throughout the nineteenth century, Obama projected his visit as a business trip while also framing his presence on the island within a strong ethnic context as a living example of American activism. A racialized self- characterization as an African American dominates his official speech, delivered in Havana on March 22, 2016 to a crowd of about one thousand individuals handpicked because of their roles within the political structure of the Communist Party. The speech was shared widely via radio and television coverage, and Obama had the opportunity to meet privately with notable dissenters living in Cuba. From his privileged vantage point as the first African American–elected president, Obama started his speech by emphasizing the importance of his trip: “Havana is only 90 miles from Florida, but to get here, we had to travel a great distance, over barriers of history and ideology, barriers of pain and separation.” 20 The physical nearness of Cuba to the United States is a symbolic entry into a description of the similarities and, better yet, the historical intersections between both countries. The speech was short, about thirty minutes long, including a small number of rather restrained applause breaks. It was seemingly purposely devoid of any controversial references to political figures, either American or Cuban. There was, however, a notable exception. Obama opened the speech with a peace offering,
Journal of Transnational American Studies 10 .1 (Summer 2019) 291 with a slavery connection must have been top of mind, too. Obama’s mention of ropa vieja, a stew of salted, dried beef, is an iconic dish in modern Cuban cuisine that was also part of the meager food allowance given to enslaved workers. Beyond the political significance of considering the United States a multiethnic country by means of boldly recognizing Africa as a shared motherland, the president addressed the ways in which the United States continues to struggle with the legacy of slavery. A notable characteristic of the speech is its direct connection with elements central to the narrative of the literature of the plantation. In particular, Obama highlighted the resourcefulness of Cubans, who, in spite of the limits imposed by the economic US embargo, have found ingenious ways to survive financially. Entrepreneurial Cubans, whom Obama named as cuentapropistas , are resourceful individuals who are officially allowed to own private business in exchange for payment of high taxes to the revolutionary government. Obama proudly praised them in Spanish: “El cubano inventa del aire”; Cubans can invent anything from pure air. Clearly aware that many of these private business owners are afro- descendientes , or Cubans of African descent, President Obama went a step further in his underlying message. In his most direct attack on the revolutionary political establishment, speaking of racial inequalities, he added: “And in Cuba, we want our engagement to help lift up the Cubans who are of African American descent, who have proven there’s nothing they cannot achieve when given a chance.” 24 Indirectly, Afro- Cubans are, like their enslaved African ancestors, cultural innovators, turning insipid salted beef jerk, the food item allocated to rural enslaved workers, into delicious ropa vieja. Like previous enslaved workers and freed blacks, today’s cuentapropistas work within the system; even, as Obama stresses, “while sustaining a distinctly Cuban spirit. Being self-employed is not about becoming more like America, it’s about being yourself.” Clearly missing from his stated desire that US engagement with Cuba will “help lift up the Cubans who are of African American descent,” is an explanation of ways in which an Afro-descendiente US president could achieve such change in Cuba. He did refer to the activist lessons learned from the Civil Rights Movement that, as he pointed out, took place at the same time the Cuban Revolution was also confronting US congressional opposition. The radical societal changes brought by this movement, as Obama remembered, are placed within a narrative more similar to an abolitionist discourse, by means of popular protests: “[P]eople organized. They protested. They debated these issues, they challenged the government officials. And because of those protests and because of those debates and because of popular mobilization, I’m able to stand here today as an African American and as president of the United States. That was because of the freedoms that were afforded in the United States, that we were able to bring about change.” The reference to the Civil Rights protests brought him into the contested arena of political dissension or counterrevolutionary activism, which the Cuban Revolution has traditionally curtailed by means of strong criminal laws. In fact, in his initial address
292 Ocasio | A Transnational Slavery Narrative to the audience, Obama chose a rather unscripted approach. Reacting to news reports that the Islamic State (IS) group had bombed Brussels’s airport and a metro station on March 22, he unambiguously stated that the United States “ stand[s] in solidarity with them [Belgians] in condemning these outrageous attacks against innocent people.” 25 His promise to the Belgian people indirectly addressed similar terrorism, to which the Cuban Revolution had been linked worldwide: “We will do whatever is necessary to support our friend and ally, Belgium[,] in bringing to justice those who are responsible. And this is yet another reminder that the world must unite. We must be together, regardless of nationality or race or faith in fighting against the scourge of terrorism.” A cold silence followed, an indication that indeed the subject of terroristic and guerrilla warfare tactics was a point of contention in Cuban–US diplomatic negotiations. Conclusion: Today’s Legacy of the TransAtlantic Slavery Trade In analyzing the racialized elements of a nineteenth-century sugarcane plantation narrative , I am mindful of the latter’s ideological connections with similar, contemporary conversations on the impact of slavery and its cultural and political legacies. Although Howe’s depictions of enslaved customs drew heavily from formulaic legal and administrative documentation pertaining to the management of enslaved workers, he personalized them and presented them as efficient workers, in spite of the overwhelming work conditions pervading the plantation. Indeed, he often expressed dissatisfaction about the rustic conditions he personally experienced at Ingenio New Hope and yearned to see the day he could return to his family in Bristol. Of course, Howe’s downfall was his hesitation to condemn the covert managerial practices that, as an administrator, he would have witnessed, including physical abuse and horrific punishment methods. I was also struck by President Obama’s message of political freedom for a postmillennium Cuba, which, like Howe’s narrative of plantation literature, drew from a bold historical reading of an old ideological order still in operation under revolutionary practices. Boldly, Obama pointed to similar national racist attitudes as remnants of the strict racialized social order during the slavery period. Ultimately, his strongest point, in a rather ingenious speech that attempted to address a variety of political subjects, comprised highlighting racial dissonance as the result of a slavery past, a dissonance existing at the center of a national political discourse, in both the United States and in Cuba. Indeed, as Antonio Tillis has summarized, an in-depth exploration of the historical relevance of Afro-descendientes in today’s Latin American societies is of prime importance in understanding a colonial past still in operation: “[T] he Americas are bridged to Africa in a way that cements the fluidity of cultural transfer and the fight for visibility, power, and a more inclusive understanding of national identity and culture.” 26 President Obama’s speech went a step further: As a politician and an African American, he bravely articulated the belief that social equality, both in the United States and in Cuba, will only be achieved when the legacy of slavery
294 Ocasio | A Transnational Slavery Narrative rising Afro-Cuban activists to explore and was a central message in his historical speech from the perspective of an Afro-descendiente at the pinnacle of a US democracy. Notes I am thankful to Ms. Truitt, who brought my attention to George Howe’s manuscript at “Beyond Sweetness: New Histories of Sugar in the Early Atlantic World,” a conference on the historical development of sugar in the Americas celebrated in 2013 at Brown University. I am thankful to her for her walking me through a myriad of details pertaining to the slavery trade operating in Bristol, including her research pertaining to George Howe and other local men who provided services that supported Bristolian- owned sugarcane plantations in the Cuban province of Matanzas. I am also indebted to Lisa DeCesare for facilitating permission to use excerpts from Howe’s diaries and to reproduce his drawings. (^1) Miguel A. Bretos , Matanzas: The Cuba Nobody Knows (University Press of Florida, 2010), 143. (^2) President Obama was in good company. Prior to his trip to Cuba, other American personalities whose visits were extensively covered in the media in both countries included megastar singers like Beyoncé and her husband Jay Z; actress and singer Rihanna; and pop stars Katy Perry and Usher. Actors and directors have also come to Cuba, among them Robert Redford, Benicio del Toro, Danny Glover, Harry Belafonte, Kevin Costner, and Steven Spielberg. (^3) Dan Roberts, “Obama Lands in Cuba as First US President to Visit in Nearly a Century,” The Guardian , March 21, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/20/barack- obama-cuba-visit-us-politics-shift-public-opinion-diplomacy. (^4) All citations referring to President Obama’s speech in Cuba are from Time magazine’s transcription: “Read President Obama’s Speech to the Cuban People,” Time, March 22, 2016 , http://time.com/4267933/barack-obama-cuba-speech-transcript-full-text. (^5) Howe’s diary is available at the special collections in the Bristol Historical Society in Bristol, Rhode Island. All quotations are from June Truitt’s transcription. (^6) Leonardo Marques, The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas, 1776 – 1867 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 2. (^7) A Forgotten History: The Slave Trade and Slavery in New England (Brown University: Choice for the 21st^ Century Education Program and Watson Institute for International Studies, 2008), 20. (^8) David W. Blight, “Introduction” in Teaching Hard History: American Slavery , ed. Kate Shuster (Atlanta: Southern Poverty Law Center, 2018), 7.
Journal of Transnational American Studies 10 .1 (Summer 2019) 295 (^9) “How Slavery Is Taught Today” in Teaching Hard History: American Slavery , ed. Kate Shuster (Atlanta: Southern Poverty Law Center, 2018) 16–17. (^10) Matthew Pratt Guterl, American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 186. (^11) All citations are from June Truitt’s transcript, available at the Bristol Historical Society, here page 24. (^12) Outside the scope of this book are the plentiful political discussions throughout the eighteenth century by American politicians regarding a formal expansion of the United States in Cuba within a formal annexation of the island. (^13) Mimi Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombie s (London: Routledge, 2003), 13. (^14) Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean , 88. (^15) Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean , 93. (^16) William M. LeoGrande and Peter Karnbluh, Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 369. (^17) Fidel Castro, “The November 4 Elections,” in Obama and the Empire (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2011), 9. (^18) Fidel Castro, “The Cynicism,” in Obama and the Empire , 6. (^19) Fidel Castro, “Not a Word about the Blockade,” in Obama and the Empire , 50. (^20) Obama, “Read President Obama’s Speech,” transcript. (^21) The version published by Time does not include Obama’s phrases in Spanish. All quotations in Spanish are my own transcriptions from the original speech available on C-Span (“President Obama Speech in Cuba, Full Speech,” C-Span , http://cs.pn/1MzALdZ). (^22) Obama, “Read President Obama’s Speech,” transcript. (^23) Obama, “Read President Obama’s Speech,” transcript. (^24) Obama, “Read President Obama’s Speech,” transcript. (^25) Obama, “Read President Obama’s Speech,” transcript. (^26) Antonio D. Tillis, “Introduction,” in Critical Perspectives on Afro-Latin American Literature , ed. Antonio D. Tillis (New York: Routledge, 2012), xiv.
