ABSTRACT
Over the course of 30 years of struggle for independence against Spain, the war effort had become entwined with struggles of people of African descent and workers for social justice. These rather radical aspects of the revolution assumed new political significance with the inauguration of the military occupation. As Americans strayed from their initial commitment to free Cuba from Spanish tyranny to the alleged pacification of the island, the future birth of the Cuban republic became contingent on the ability of Cuban political leaders to demonstrate their ability to self-govern. The linchpin of capacity to self-govern was social order, which required the abandonment of revolutionary commitments to social justice. Even though 12 years had passed since the final abolition of slavery in 1886, planters and merchants still relied heavily upon black labor to plant, harvest, and transport their sugar. They had increasingly employed imported Spanish laborers over the last quarter of the nineteenth century, but formerly enslaved men and women remained a vital source of labor in the most important economic sector in central Cuba, the sugar industry.2 Many families remained on the plantations on which they were born or had lived most of their lives, and continued to work for the same hacendados after they achieved freedom, while others established themselves as colonos, independent cultivators of sugar, who were usually bound to the large mills who bought and processed their raw cane.3 Black labor was vital to the expansion of railroad lines. At the ports, black men also provided the labor to load the sugar onto steamers destined for the United States and elsewhere since at least the 1880s.4
