ABSTRACT
In 1879, the Brazilian representative in Madrid wrote to the Foreign Ministry in Rio de Janeiro about recent developments in one of Spain’s two remaining American colonies: Cuba. Such reports were common in this period as both the Spanish and the Brazilian monarchies tried to control the process of slave emancipation. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, Madrid reported back to Rio on emancipation laws, the likelihood of Spanish immigration to Brazil, and the impact of indentured Chinese workers on the Cuban economy. This particular report highlighted the gravest challenge facing the colonial government in Cuba: how to manage the abolition of slavery in the context of an anticolonial uprising:
Because General Martínez Campos ‘Captain General of Cuba’ decided that in the peace treaty with the Cuban insurgents there should be inserted a clause emancipating the slaves who fought in the rebel ranks, it was foreseeable that those ‘slaves’ who did not take up arms against Spain would demand the same. That is the only explanation for the slave insurrection in the district of Santiago, which today is in a state of siege.1
