The Occupation of Havana

Every new generation of historians formulates new questions to interrogate the past and provides new answers to existing ones. Drawing from a renewed Atlantic historiography that in recent decades has emphasized interimperial ties and networks and from recent discussions about Afro-Cubans' place in their nation's history, Elena A. Schneider's award-winning The Occupation of Havana provides a bold reinterpretation, rooted in new and exciting findings, of the city's British occupation in 1762–63.Structured chronologically to discuss the occupation's origins, events, and aftermath, the first part of the book interprets the occupation as the logical culmination of an Anglo-Spanish imperial rivalry that developed to the rhythm of the slave trade to Jamaica—an island captured by the British from the Spanish in 1655. The War of Jenkins' Ear, which took place between 1739 and 1748, contributed to the dynamics of this rivalry and served as a rehearsal for the later occupation of Havana. By midcentury, the British saw the city as a growing military threat and as the basis for vigorous privateering that preyed on their North American and Caribbean colonies.But this rivalry in reality concealed fundamental interimperial ties, according to Schneider. For decades, commerce, contraband, and the slave trade bound together Havana and the British Caribbean with ever-growing intensity. During the first half of the century, the asiento, a commercial treaty between the British and the Spanish crown to supply enslaved Africans to Spain's overseas territories, enabled the arrival of 40,000 of them (and probably some more through contraband) for the nascent production of sugar and other items. Accompanied by an important trade in flour from Britain's North American colonies, asiento contracts also facilitated contraband between Cuba and the British colonies, both in enslaved humans and in goods. By the mid-1700s, such contraband trade had become, according to Schneider, “the island's lifeblood” (p. 89). For all these reasons, the occupation of Havana represented not a breakdown of existing interimperial relations, as was traditionally argued, but an intensification of them.Discussing the siege itself, Schneider shifts gears to focus mainly on the island's Black militias, which had been gaining importance since the early 1700s due to the growing military engagements. These militias, Schneider contends, ended up comprising a staggering two-thirds of the city's defenders as the siege began in June 1762 continued through July (p. 123). The successive counterattacks launched by Havana's defenders relied mostly on these free and recently liberated individuals. Fearing reenslavement by the British, the usual destiny for free Blacks during the eighteenth-century Caribbean interimperial wars, Black Havanans also provided most of the labor for food production and other activities during the war, and many of them ran inland to keep resisting the invaders once the city fell on August 11, 1762.Less glorious was the role played by the city's planter and commercial elites. They gained access to British markets and savored the elimination of metropolitan control and taxation; they obtained a de facto sanction of the contraband trade that they had already been practicing for decades. It is thus unsurprising that during the siege loyalist Havanans saw those elites as “embarrassingly complicit in British rule” (p. 183). Contrary to the traditional account, the slave trade itself did not expand as a result of the siege, as British commander Lord Albemarle kept it under a strict fiscal control and sought to draw enormous personal profit from it.The Spanish reoccupation brought official recognition of the heroic role played by Black troops in Havana's defense, coupled with long-term changes that undermined their status. Initially, the crown granted legal freedom to 456 formerly enslaved Black men who had defended the city, rewarded a number of Black militia officers with pensions, and paid public homage to them. As reconstruction unfolded in the following decades, however, the crown's embrace of the Caribbean plantation model created a powerful planter and merchant class that gradually tightened racial hierarchies and undermined the status and prerogatives of the island's Black militias, now feared and disliked by sugar planters. By the end of the century, Cuba's planter class was trying to rewrite history by eliminating from the record Black Havana's resistance to the siege and by painting the occupation as gloriously heralding a new era of free trade and sugar production.Schneider's The Occupation of Havana, in sum, sheds new light on not only the origins of the occupation but also its main actors. Perhaps this double focus will surprise readers, as the emphasis on the role played by the Black militias is not entirely clear in the title of the book. Like Matt Childs's The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery (2006), this book restores Afro-Cuban agency to the island's history—an agency actually vindicated by free Black militia member José Antonio Aponte himself in 1812, when he led a revolt for abolition and independence. By then, however, the tide had turned. As this brilliantly researched and vibrantly narrated study argues, by 1800 “the Spanish king's new bargain with his wealthy white subjects in Cuba sold out the black soldiers who had defended Havana from British attack” back in 1762 (p. 310)

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