Legally Visible: Glimpses of the Enslaved Africans Who Built Havana

On October 13, 1841, the district judge for the Havana neighborhood of Guadalupe, don Matías Barranco, put the finishing touches on eighty-two pages of sworn testimony describing a rebellion by enslaved workers on a nearby construction site.[1] The deposition recounts a dramatic uprising that occurred within the partially built walls of an opulent mansion commissioned by the mid-nineteenth century’s wealthiest Cuban sugar baron, don Domingo de Aldama. Today the Palacio de Aldama stands blocks from the national Capitol in central Havana. With a stately façade comprised of a street-level Doric colonnade topped by a second story of taut Ionic pilasters, the masonry structure designed by the military engineer Manuel José Carrera has been repeatedly identified as the first significant neoclassical residence in Cuba (Figure 1).

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Figure 1. The Palacio de Aldama, Havana, Cuba, c. 1841­–1844. Photograph by Dante Furioso, September 2023.

Analysis of legal sources provides a glimpse of labor obscured by the building’s equally stately legacy. In fact, the 1841 revolt of enslaved Africans during its construction has been mentioned by a handful of historians of slavery like Ada Ferrer, Manuel Barcia, and José Antonio Piqueras. Yet, scholars of architecture like Pedro Herrera and J.M. Bens Arrarte have all but ignored the rich detail about the building process revealed by the testimony contained in the deposition. Therefore, an interdisciplinary analysis of this legal source promises to stimulate connections between the largely siloed studies of architectural history and the history of slavery, capturing a unique view of urban construction labor. Bridging this divide is important given the nature of the plantation economy that undergirded the production of nearly all architecture in nineteenth-century Cuba.

Admittedly, the revolt itself was exceptional, as most uprisings by enslaved people occurred on the sprawling sugar plantations in western and central Cuba. Yet, the quotidian reality described in the deposition was not unique: Slave labor was the lynchpin of urban growth in the Spanish Caribbean capital in the mid-nineteenth century. Just as historians of labor like Joe William Trotter, Jr. have argued about cities in the US, from the early sixteenth to late nineteenth centuries the growth of Cuba’s urban areas would have been unthinkable without the use of enslaved and free Black builders and laborers. Other than the important role of enslaved workers in fort construction studied by Evelyn P. Jennings, the lack of scholarly work on Black and enslaved labor in Cuba, the Caribbean, and throughout Latin America within architectural history is striking. Because legal sources like depositions record the seemingly banal details of everyday work—minutiae that otherwise go largely undocumented—when incidents occur that warrant a legal case, the resulting texts can help us to understand the social reality of labor, where most traditional primary sources used in histories of the built environment cannot.

Despite the growing interest in the role of race in the formation of architecture’s ideological underpinning, stylistic developments, and uses of urban and rural space, fewer scholars have focused on race in building and construction. Tara Dudley’s 2021 book Building Antebellum New Orleans and Jay Cephas’s Black Architects’ Archive are exceptions, placing Black labor at the center of their studies of the built environment in the US. A recent article in this publication by Mira Rai Waits, “The House the Prison Built” explores the interconnected issue of prison labor in the Reconstruction Era. For colonial Cuba, legal studies may model methods and new sources of evidence for interdisciplinary research that delves into the life of workers, though a solid understanding of the historical context within which legal documents were produced is essential. Ariela Gross and Alejandro de la Fuente’s study of the law in Havana, New Orleans, and Virginia demonstrates the way enslaved Africans’ striving for freedom itself was co-constitutive with hardening legal concepts of blackness and whiteness within the US and Cuban slave societies. According to Alina Castellanos Rubio, the period in which this deposition was generated was defined by military courts that sought control over a multiracial, urban population. The 1841 deposition provides granular evidence solicited and framed in the service of the interests of white, slave-holding elites, and imperial state power. While it is a record of racialized violence, it is also a rare source whose own structure reflects a view of the network of labor needed to construct significant buildings in colonial Cuba (Figure 2).

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Figure 2. The sixth page of the 1841 deposition with the end of don Domingo de Aldama's testimony and the beginning of don Evaristo del Monte's testimony. Domingo Aldama and et. al., “Depositions of Domingo Aldama, et. al. Havana, October 1841,” October 9, 1841, Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad de la Habana.

The composition of the deposition places the hierarchies of the military court in dialogue with rank, class, and race within the social labor process of construction, highlighting parallels and connections. For example, the order in which the testimonies were taken reflected class hierarchies and the racialization of labor that was condensed on the urban construction site. The owner, don Domingo de Aldama, is deposed first, followed by those wielding authority on the job site: the administrator, overseer, and assistant overseer precede the enslaved workers interviewed later. Both the property owner and slave master, don Domingo Aldama, and his Santo-Domingo-born construction site administrator, Evaristo del Monte were literate in Spanish. Below their testimony written by the official scribe, Aldama and Del Monte signed with characteristically nineteenth-century embellishments. Then the white, Cuban-born overseer, Valentín Toledo, and the assistant overseer, Mariano, an enslaved man owned by Aldama leave their testimonies unsigned: Both are evidently illiterate.

Yet, the deposition attests to language abilities beyond handling a quill: In Mariano’s testimony, we learn that he acted as the interpreter for the men on site because he spoke Spanish and Yoruba, the language of the Lucumí.[2] In addition, an interpreter was present for the testimony of the Lucumí men held in the public jail and the hospital.[3] Translation and interpretation filtered the production of the legal document recording the uprising, mediating labor on the construction site. That is, Mariano’s role as interpreter as revealed in the deposition suggests the larger role of interpretation that he would have played during the construction process itself.

“Strung between the lines of the testimony a network of places and productive activity begins to emerge. Taken together, these moments provide a glimpse of the labor—and especially Black labor—that was essential to building cities across the Americas.”

Not only does this legal document seek to explain why Blas and the other enslaved men revolted against their master, but it also sketches unexpected connections between urban construction and rural plantations. Lisa Haber-Thomson has argued that centuries-old legal tools like the writ of habeas corpus not only serve to document the “constellation of characters” involved in legal proceedings, but they provide an “illustration that allows us to perfectly picture the scene” of the legal proceedings and the network of spaces and places (geometries and geographies) undergirding the carceral system. Haber-Thomson’s close reading of habeas in the case of a murder aboard a British merchant ship is a reminder that legal instruments themselves produce a kind of space not always captured in traditional sources. Similarly, the 1841 deposition establishes connections between worlds that have been siloed by historiography: that of urban construction and rural plantation slavery. This is born out in the deposition, as we learn that prior to working on the building site, Mariano was stationed at one of Aldama’s sugar plantations.[4]

The text itself captures the interlinked sites of discipline and the state, which supported the system of slave labor that was so crucial for building labor in Cuba. Testimonies were recorded across a set of linked sites including the formal space of the courtroom in the case of Aldama’s testimony, but also the prison and hospital where some of the enslaved Africans involved in the uprising were being held. The rote procedure of naming these locations at the start of each testimony not only identifies these well-known sites of detainment, which were necessary for the functioning of forced labor, but connects them to auxiliary sites like the nearby quarry that were tethered to the system of incarceration and punishment of this labor system and the production of stone needed for masonry construction. Indeed, the military judge notes within the document that Aldama sent his slaves to the quarry immediately after their arrest to spend three days laboring before they were transferred to the public jail to testify for the deposition. That is, while various Spanish soldiers were being interviewed, five of the enslaved Lucumí men were enduring forced labor in the same quarry from which Aldama had ordered stone for his mansion.[5] The process of collecting testimony to determine culpability also outlines the interconnected sites of architectural production, places whose function in building and discipline were completely intertwined.

Of course, there are many pitfalls to writing architectural histories using period legal documents produced by colonial authorities. The function of the deposition was to determine whether the violence meted out against the rebellious Lucumí men was justified, not to provide a complete account of life on the construction site. Thus, the military judge asked leading questions establishing that the uprising was instigated by a few lone individuals and that it was not in reaction to the enslaved Africans’ treatment by their master or the other overseers or administrators on the construction site. Had the Lucumí men shown signs of mistreatment, Aldama could have technically been prosecuted, though slave owners were seldom held responsible for violence against slaves.

Read against the grain, the document provides information about architecture and construction in a slave society that is difficult to glean elsewhere. While the deposition is filled with dubious claims to support Aldama and his employees’ claim of good conditions for the enslaved Africans, these include offhanded comments about their movement, the kind of work they performed during the day, and how they spent their free time. Strung between the lines of the testimony a network of places and productive activity begins to emerge. Taken together, these moments provide a glimpse of the labor—and especially Black labor—that was essential to building cities across the Americas.

Notes

[1] Domingo Aldama and et. al., “Depositions of Domingo Aldama, et. al. Havana, October 1841,” October 9, 1841, Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad de la Habana. A copy of the deposition is also available at the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid. See Ministerio de Ultramar, “Expediente reservado sobre un motín de negros en la propiedad de Domingo Aldama,” 1841, ES.28079.AHN/16//ULTRAMAR,8,Exp.10, Archivo Histórico Nacional (Spain), http://pares.mcu.es/ParesBusquedas20/catalogo/description/1333031.

[2] Aldama and et. al., “Depositions of Domingo Aldama, et. al. Havana, October 1841.”, 21v­–23v.

[3] Aldama and et. al., “Depositions of Domingo Aldama, et. al. Havana, October 1841,” 4v­–11v.

[4] Aldama and et. al., “Depositions of Domingo Aldama, et. al. Havana, October 1841,” 9v–10r.

[5] Aldama and et. al., 20v.

Citation

Dante Furioso, “Legally Visible: Glimpses of the Enslaved Africans Who Built Havana ,” PLATFORM, Sep 30, 2024.