“La relación de sus males, [y] el medio de curarlos”. Trans-American Models of Slave Labor Organization in José Antonio Saco’s Análisis de una obra sobre el Brasil

Abstract

José Antonio Saco’s Análisis de una obra sobre el Brasil (1832), the first condemnation of the slave trade published in Cuba, is among the creole statesman and historian’s most critically cited texts. Still, it continues to perplex students of the Cuban nineteenth century, who struggle to reconcile Saco’s liberal reformist program with his seemingly ambiguous stance on slavery. This study looks to resolve this critical impasse through the analytical tools provided by Dale Tomich. As Tomich perceptively reveals, the logic underpinning nineteenth-century liberalism and pro-slavery thinking were mutually supportive. What is more, in Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy, Tomich maps the contours of the Caribbean’s heterogeneous slaveries, which Saco knowingly conflates in his Análisis, I wish to argue, to further his liberal political project.