[Cuba]. [Chinese Labor]

[Manuscript Manifest of Chinese Laborers Bound for Havana]

Macau: April 6, 1867. [6]pp., on large folio partially-printed forms, printed in two columns, completed in manuscript. Old folds with minor losses at a few spots along the horizontal fold. Very good. Item #3978

Five hundred and fifty Chinese laborers bound for Cuba aboard the Spanish galley "Cervantes" are listed by name, with their age and town or city of origin given. The laborers hail from several different cities in China, and their ages range from 18 to 36, with the majority of the men in their 20s. The end of the document is signed and dated on the final page by José de Aguilar, the Spanish consul at Macau. The left side of the final page contains two separate lists, one with five numbers and the other with four numbers, keyed to the manifest. The list of five names has an "x" next to each number, perhaps noting that these men did not in fact make the trip to Cuba; each "x" could also signal that these men died during the voyage from Macau to Cuba, which was a common-enough occurrence that it is often noted on manifests of this kind.

Chinese indentured servitude in 19th-century Cuba was an insidious practice tantamount to slavery, which flourished in Cuba even after the abolition of the peculiar institution in the British West Indies. With their free source of labor no longer available, plantation owners in Cuba looked elsewhere; and they looked east. From around 1848 to the mid-1870s, over 100,000 Chinese indentured servants made their way to Cuba, often sailing to Cuba in large groups. Once they arrived, Chinese laborers indentured themselves to Cuban masters for terms of at least five years. The treatment of Asian indentured servants in Cuba varied widely, with reports of some particularly ill-treated laborers ending their lives by suicide. "Some contemporaries and later historians...have condemned the servitude of the Asians as a thinly disguised revival of slavery. These critics have pointed to a variety of abuses to which the Asians were subjected, both legally - with severe laws governing absenteeism, vagrancy, and insufficient work - and illegally, in the form of harassment by vicious masters. Yet other observers have defended the system as a boon to the Asian workers. Voluntary reindenture at the end of their terms was common among the migrants, suggesting that many Asians judged the system to be beneficial to them" - Drescher.
Seymour Drescher & Stanley L. Engerman, editors, A Historical Guide to World Slavery (New York, 1998), pp.239-42.

Price: $4,250.00