In other respects, the contract as well as the series of regulations made it clear

that during the eight-year servitude, the coolies were the property of the patronos,

constituting moreover a fixed capital investment in his enterprise. Despite various

recourses legally available to the coolie to complain against abuses, excesses and

violations of the contract, other stipulations made it clear that the daily life and work of

the coolies were pretty much left to the discretion of those who bought their contracts.

Various clauses also made clear that the contract — and by extension the rights and needs

of the patrono — took precedence over rights and needs of the colono. Article 19 stated

that the colono, upon signing the contract, “renounces the exercise of all civil rights

which are not compatible with the compliance of contract obligations.” He had very little

freedom of mobility, for the colono was specifically prohibited from leaving his place

of work without the written permission of the patrono; otherwise he could be arrested

by the authority as a cimarrdn or runaway. Many of the personal rights accorded the

coolie, such as marriage and acquisition of property, had to have the approval of the

patrono. While coartation was permitted, the terms were so difficult that it was very

difficult, though not impossible (as discussed below). The selling and buying of

contracts, as well as the renting out of contracts, in practice was very little different from

slave transactions. The laws, in effect, particularly on the plantations, were flagrantly

disregarded, the contract a mere piece of paper.

COOLIE CONDITIONS IN CUBA

From the beginning, critics and cynics in Cuba noted and decried the hypocrisy

they perceived in the use of the term colono. If “colonist” implied settling the land and

working it independently, there is plenty of evidence to indicate that such was far from

the minds of those who acquired Chinese coolies and who viewed them simply as brazos

or cheap, unskilled labor. Cuban planter Pedro Diago, owner of the Ingenio Santa Elena,

remarked at the time of the first shipload in 1847, “creo que convendrd su inmigracién

para sustituir la falta de brazos africanos,” to which the Junta de Fomento later added,

“no solo conveniente, sino indispensable” and “el tinico recurso para proporcionar

brazos.’”* Although no more than 20% of the total imported went into domestic service,

public works, and small industries, the vast majority, 80% or more, were sent directly

to the plantations.'* In practice and in some of the laws, the Chinese were denied most

of their rights as free men under contract and after the contract period, and were hardly

regarded by other members of either society as immigrants or colonists. Most of all, the

critics of this system — both contemporary observers as well as historians examining it

retroactively — have focused on the actual physical conditions of work and daily life on

the plantations for the Chinese coolies. There, of course, the Chinese were confronted

with the tradition of slavery, their patronos seasoned slave owners. In Cuba, the Chinese

working alongside slaves, performing basically the same unskilled tasks, with some

small number assigned to more skilled labor.

Coolie traders as well as the planters made little attempt to readjust the system

or even to change the terminology. In South China, hapless Chinese, mostly poor young

men, were “recruited” by force and deception by their own countrymen commonly

called by the Westerners crimps or runners [corredores] — just as their counterparts in

Africa were called. While waiting to be embarked in Macao, these recruits were housed

in “barracoons.” Many of the same ships and captains used in the African slave trade now

transported Chinese coolies, packing them on board in the same way as slaves, across

a “Middle Passage” that was even longer in distance and more arduous. Mortality rates

on these coolie ships — known also as “floating coffins” — were as high as 25 or 30%,

and averaged 16% for Cuba.'6

Upon their arrival in Havana, the coolies were locked up in the depdsitos until

they (technically their contracts) were auctioned off in lots in the same market used to

sell slaves. In the plantations, the coolies were housed in the same quarters as slaves or

former slaves. The administrators resorted to the same methods of control and punish-

ment — stocks and metal bars [cepo and barras], leg chains [grillete], whippings

[azotes], jails and lockups, even executions. Notices appeared in the local newspapers

regarding chinos cimarrones (cimarrones being a term that specifically applied to

runaway slaves) or venta de chinos, although legally, of course, neither the contract nor

certainly the person of the Chinese could be sold.!”

In the actual treatment of the coolies, itis clear that the patronos lived the legacy

of slavery: “They thought only in terms of a slave system; they could not think beyond

that system, and they did not want to go beyond.” The coolie system was erected upon

the foundations laid by slavery. As with slaves, the planters enjoyed “absolute power”

over the coolies.!8

The coolies, for their part, also responded to the harshness of the plantation

regime much as slaves did. They rebelled, individually or collectively; they protested to

the authorities whenever possible though usually with little effect against the over-

whelming power of the planters over the judicial system in spite of certain laws; they ran

away; they resorted to suicide. They even joined insurrections against Spain in Cuba’s

Ten Year War in order to bargain for their personal freedom.'?

On the part of contemporary observers turned critics of the coolie system, as

well as of twentieth century historians examining the system, many viewed this

treatment of legally free men, albeit under contract for eight years, as no different from

chattel slaves, thus concluding that coolies were slaves or semiesclavos and the system

another form of slavery. In many of the critics, an undertone of moral outrage is quite

audible.

EXTENSION AND ADJUSTMENTS TO THE COOLIE SYSTEM

When the coolie trade was cut off in 1874, many of those already in Cuba still

had to work off their terms of servitude. Moreover, mechanisms were put in place to

extend the term of service, to force or otherwise entice the Chinese to continue working

under some kind of contract primarily on the plantations, where demand for labor

continued to be high.

In Cuba, forced recontracting began early, with the Reglamento of 1860

discussed above, which obligated those coolies who had completed their first 8 years to

recontract (for an unspecified period of time) or to leave Cuba at their own expense. Only

those whose contracts expired before 1861 were exempt. To critics such as Pérez de la

Riva, recontracting simply further confirmed his conclusion that the coolie system was

slavery, in that compulsory and successive recontracting perpetuated servitude indefi-

nitely to the point that the legal distinction between indenture and slavery became truly

blurred by the practice.

There is no doubt that the Cubans issued the recontracting regulation in order

to keep as many as possible of this captive alien labor force on the plantations, knowing

full well that very few of the coolies could have saved enough from their meager wages

to pay for their passage home. Equally undeniable a factor was racism, for the question

of race definitely figured into this decision to keep the Chinese unfree. Cuban slavers and

abolitionists alike had trouble dealing with a free nonwhite population, and concerned

about the further mongrelization of Cuban society with the admission of another

undesirable coloured race (see below). Recontracting succeeded well as a devise to keep

Chinese labor in agriculture for as long as possible. The 1872 Cuban census noted 58,400

Chinese, of whom 14,046 were “free,” i.e. men who had completed their original

contracts. Nevertheless, of this number, 10,044 remained in agriculture.?? Records

uncovered by historians in the People’s Republic of China, using Chinese records, reveal

that from 1880 to 1885, a period when many of the coolies sent to Cuba and Peru during

the height (also the last thrust) of the coolie trade in the first half of the 1870s would have

completed their original contracts, only 1,887 of the Chinese managed to make their way

back home to China. This was an insignificant number, given the over 100,000 who left

China in 1870-74 alone for Cuba and Peru.”!

Recontracting took a further, and significant new turn beginning as early as

1870 in Cuba. While the original recontracts were signed between the individual coolie

whose contract had just expired, and the planter or his administrator, usually the same

ones who held the original contracts, a new contracting system involved a free Chinese

— operating as an enganchador (labor contractor or broker) — who engaged and

organized fellow free Chinese [chinos libres] into cuadrillas or gangs. This entire group

of cuadrilleros was then hired out to a plantation for a specified period of time or a

specific piece of work, such as the evaporating room [casa de calderas] in the ingenios

{sugar factory on the estate] of Cuba.”

The Chinese enganchador negotiated all terms of work for his squad and

handled all aspects of employment for the workers, including obtaining the advances

from the planters to pay them, handing out tools, arranging for lodging and food,

responsible for discipline, control, supervision. He also assumed the risks of all losses

and damages. He was likely once acoolie himself, now an independent merchant trading

in goods and men.

By the census of 1872, 14,064 coolies had completed their original contracts,

become naturalized or registered as a “foreign resident.” Under contract were 34,408

coolies; 7,036 were runaways still missing, 864 were captured runaways, and 684 were

sentenced criminals. Awaiting recontracting in the depdsitos [holding cells] were only

864.73 Thus, the planters welcomed the Chinese cuadrillas in 1870 as an innovative

devise to keep the Chinese working on their estates after their contracts expired. But they

also realized that the presence of these chinos libres posed a severe problem of control

over slaves and especially coolies still under contract. An editorial in the Boletin de

Colonizacién, an official organ of the colonial government that represented sugar

interests, concerned about the high rate of marronismo or runaways, charged that these

cuadrillas were the principal cause of flight. The writer asserted that the runaways could

easily hide among the other cuvadrilleros, and that their presence “demoralized the

workers.”*4 Thus, the colonial authorities banned the use of cuadrillas, choosing the

necessity of control over economic flexibility. But they were revived in 1879, at the end

of the Ten Years’ War. The coolie trade as well as slave imports had been terminated for

several years, and labor in short supply.°

For the Chinese, given the 1860 regulation forcing them to recontract or leave

the island, joining one of these cuadrillas was one way to stay in Cuba without resorting

to the much hated individual contract with a patrono. And as in Peru, the Chinese

contractor accumulated capital for business through this process.”

As the decade of the eighties drew to a close, Cuba saw the end of dependence

on slave and coolie labor on the plantations. The old plantation system gave way to the

colonos or independent small farmers who cultivated and supplied the newly modern-

ized mills with the raw canes. Many of these colonos were new immigrants from Europe

(mostly Canary Islanders and Gallegos).

ANALYSIS AND CONCLUSIONS

If one focuses strictly on the eight year term of servitude that the Chinese

coolies bound themselves to by signing the contracts — specifically the condition of

work; the actual physical treatment they received at the hands of planters, administrators,

overseers; the denial of personal freedom; the spatial proximity to slavery — there is no

escaping the conclusion that the coolie system very closely resembled plantation

slavery. Such was the strong indictment issued by critics such as Cuban historians Juan

Pérez de la Riva and Juan Jiménez Pastrana, both of whom have written extensively on

aspects of the coolie trade and coolie life. Pérez dela Riva accused the Cuban planters,

the Spanish slave and coolie traders [negreros] and their allies — who had profited

immensely from the coolie trade — of wanting to convert the coolie into a “permanent

slave“ [esclavo permanente]. In studying the legal status of the coolie, he detected a

strong “slave mentality” [espiritu esclavista] underlying the legislation, and denounced

the hypocrisy of a system that brazenly flaunted the law in order to protect the interests

of the elite2? In all his writings on this controversial, complicated subject, Pérez la de

Riva remained firm in his conviction that the coolie system was more properly speaking

esclavitud china.”

Jiménez Pastrana, the other Cuban historian most associated with the study of

the coolie system, also concluded that in their practice the Cuban planters and coolie

traders reduced the system to “a disguised slavery,” and that “colono” was a euphemism

for a labor force that was cheaper than slaves. However, he also agreed with another

colleague, Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Cuba’s most eminent historian of the sugar

industry, that the coolie “theoretically was nota slave, because he was salaried. And, as

such, he represented an early step in the rise of our working class. The Chinese colono

was really an agricultural worker, with a miserable salary, whose socioeconomic

situation must be included in the history of the Cuban labor movement.’”””? Or, in Moreno

Fraginals’ words: “The Chinese constituted the first step in solving the labor problem

which permitted the beginning of industrialization of sugar: to effect the transition from

manufacturing to industrial production.”?° In other words, Moreno Fraginals and

Jiménez Pastrana recognized that the Chinese, in spite of their abject condition on the

plantation, constituted a transition to free labor, which they considered essential to

industrialization — meaning mechanization and modernization with a skilled, free labor

force.

Rebecca Scott took issue with Moreno Fraginals’ assertion that modernization

required a free and skilled labor force. In her study of Cuban slavery during its last stage

of “gradual abolition,” which was also the period of the coolie trade, she concluded that

the plantations survived and thrived with a mixture of different labor systems — slave,

indentured and free — and involving several racial groups — blacks, Asians, whites,

American Indians and mixed-bloods — “without repudiating slavery itself."' Far from

incompatible, the slave plantation regime was maintained under capitalist industrializa-

tion. And far from destroying slavery, the undeniable importance of Chinese labor in the

survival and developing of the Cuban sugar industry also ensured the perpetuation of

slavery for several more decades. She found that most coolies performed the same type

of unskilled, backbreaking agricultural tasks as slaves, that sugar mills mechanized

heavily in the 1860s and 70s using both slave and coolie labor interchangeably, and that

technology did not render the slave undesirable. If coolies were not substantially

different from slaves, Scott argued, then one cannot assume that they were essential to

mechanization. The fact that coolie contracts were bought and sold, and that coolies had

to be housed, clothed and fed at all times even when their labor was not needed, meant

that economically for the planter, they constituted a form of fixed capital just like the

slaves, not variable capital as wage laborers would have been. Moreover, she observed,

most planters and administrators treated coolies as “virtual slaves.” At best, then, “they

were debt peons of a sort, but debt peons always at risk of being reduced to the status of

those alongside whom they worked: slaves.’2?

French Canadian ethnologist Denise Helly, who also studied the Chinese

coolies in Cuba and thus confronted with the question of whether they were slave or free,

tends to support Moreno Fraginals’ contention that the Chinese were employed in larger

numbers in the more skilled work —”’les installations modernisees des usines centrales.”

She cites Ramon de la Sagra’s description of the work force of the ingenio La Ponina in

1860, where 430 Chinese worked in the casa de calderas (evaporating room), compared

to 252 blacks, and 252 Chinese compared to only 28 blacks in the casa de purga (purging

room). Both these tasks were mechanized and hence required the most skills. By

contrast, on this plantation blacks vastly outnumbered Chinese, 189 to 35, in the less

skilled task of transporting cane from the field to the factory.3

Although the technicians in the boiling and purging houses were usually white

men from Europe and the U.S., the coolies were often assigned to them as aides. Their

wages, however, at 4 pesos per month, were considerably lower than that earned by the

white technicians, usually 30 pesos per month. Nevertheless, “the organization of

production integrates the coolie at the side of the salaried group on the plantation, placing

them in an inferior echelon to that occupied by whites.’*4 Moreover, Helly asserts, their

salaried status gave them a framework for voluntary association (regroupement

voluontaire) leading to collective action and protests. By contrast, planters preferred to.

keep the black slaves in agricultural work, because they were able to cut 400 arrobas of

cane per day compared to the average 200 arrobas cut by the frailer Chinese.*5 Contrary

to Scott, who argued that a varied labor force helped keep slavery alive, Helly maintains

that “the simultaneous utilization of slave and contract labor demonstrated the transfor-

mation of a slave society to a capitalist society.”*° It was Chinese labor that in part made

possible this capitalist transformation to industrial technology and free labor in the

production of sugar. While acknowledging that the “Chinese immigrants” were “cruelly

exploited, physically maltreated and their rights as free men often denied by the bosses,”

their material condition resembling that of slaves, Helly concluded that the Chinese

“should be classified at the bottom of the hierarchy of free workers according to the

wages received and tasks performed.”?7

~~ But even for Scott, the question of Chinese labor was more complex than

equating it to slavery. Regardless of how they were actually treated, legally, the

indentured laborers occupied an intermediate position in the labor hierarchy, “a third

category between slave and free,” and were occasionally perceived as especially suited

for working with machinery.** She also conceded that the cuadrilla system of labor

contracting, described above, exhibited some clear signs of free labor, as the Chinese in

this system were free men who remained free, and who collected a wage (often without

any additional payment in kind) for only the work performed. Sometimes, the cuadrillas

sought work by advertising in local newspapers.” Although technically no longer

coolies when they formed the cuadrillas under a Chinese broker, they were for the most

part coolies at one time. Coolies with expired contracts, and some runaway coolies, fed

the cuadrilla system as recruits.

Although recontracting was coercive and abusive, an examination of the

recontracting agreements reveals some variation in the terms. A batch of recontracts in

1868 indicates that the terms were short, generally 6 months or 1 year. The pay varied

greatly, from a low of 4 pesos 2 reales per month for 1 year, to 13 pesos per month for

1 year. Others were paid 8-1/2 pesos, 12 pesos, 12-3/4 pesos. Some were given food,

clothing and medical attention in addition to cash. Two workers who recontracted with

the same patrono were offered quite different wages of 8-1/2 pesos and 12 pesos

respectively.“ Unfortunately, no other information was provided in these agreements to

help explain the wide differential in pay during the same year, and sometimes on the

same estate. Presumably factors such as age and skills played a part. These recontracts

also suggest that the planters were not able to dictate uniform terms, and that, more

importantly, the coolies appeared to have had some leverage in negotiating the terms. If

this were true, then some labor market forces seemed to be at work here.

The other side of recontracting revealed its extremely coercive and abusive

nature, Among 1,176 Chinese whose depositions were taken by the Chinese Commis-

sion which visited Cuba in 1874, many of whom were serving out a recontract, many

testified that they were forced into successive recontracting. Cuban authorities and

planters were determined to keep the Chinese in the labor market by denying them the

cédula, or certificate of completion of contract, which would have permitted them

freedom of mobility and occupation. When freed from the plantation, the Chinese

preferred to move to the cities and enter petty commerce. Between contracts, those

unable to meet the demands of local authorities — who, instead of issuing the cédulas

free of charge, as provided by law, extorted illegal payments of 17 to 140 pesos for the

precious document — were sent to the municipal depdsitos [holding cells]. There they

awaited to be recontracted, or were put to work on public works construction at no pay

whatsoever. In this sense, the depdsitos served a function of holding a labor reserve for

the planters or anyone else in need of temporary help at low cost.”

But regardless of how they were treated at work, the Chinese were keenly aware

that they werefree men under contract, very distinct from the slaves who were chattel

for life. The National Archives of Cuba contain numerous protests and complaints filed

by coolies against patronos and local authorities whom they felt had violated the

contracts or some regulations, for example, those forbidding corporal punishment. Of

the 1,176 depositions taken from coolies by the Chinese Commission in 1874, most

demonstrated an awareness and deep frustration that, while legally free and protected

from abuses, they were in fact not properly treated, neither by the patronos or by the

authorities charged with protecting them.”

In addition to occupying an intermediate position between slave and free on the

labor hierarchy, as neither slave nor free, the Chinese also occupied an intermediate

position on the color scale, between black and white. Tension developed between blacks

and Asians, and was quickly understood and manipulated by the whites. Such antipathy

was exemplified by the sentiments of Esteban Montejo, the runaway slave immortalized

by Cuban writer Miguel Barnet. Montejo characterized the Chinese as aloof and

separatists.*? Chinese testimonies and criminal records show numerous conflicts,

including assaults and assassinations, between Chinese and blacks on the plantations.“

According to Helly, who studied the issue of ethnicity in depth, the introduction

of an Asian race into Cuban slave society really upset the creole ideological code, which

divided society into black and white, slave and free. Throughout the entire coolie period,

Cuban society never quite decided how to deal with the Chinese race — as white and free,

or colored and unfree. For example, in the official censuses the free Chinese were lumped

into the white category, distinct from blacks, which included both free and slave. In the

rare instances when coolies became baptized and married free Cuban women, they were

registered in the matrimonial books as “whites.’“° A judge in the Consejo de

Administraci6n in 1868 ruled that it was undesirable for blacks to own coolies (i.e., buy

their contracts), as that would upset the social order, noting that the Chinese “considers

his race superior’ to the black.*”

Concluding this discussion on the Chinese in Cuba, a lack of agreement on the

question of whether they were slave or free, and whether and how they contributed to the

transition from a slave mode of production to a capitalist mode, only points up the

ambiguity of the coolie situation: indentured labor implanted in the midst of very

entrenched slavery. The coolie system coexisted with slavery during the latter’s last

twenty-five years, both dying out at the same time. Whether coolie labor reinforced

slavery during its last gasp for life, or whether it facilitated the process of gradual

abolition and the transition to freedom, is still subject to further research and analysis.

To be sure, very little evidence can be found to mitigate the generally harsh

picture of the lot of the Chinese coolies. Nevertheless, even while recognizing that laws

were ignored or openly flaunted, it is important to separate actual physical treatment

from legal status. A well treated slave was still achattel for life by law. By the same token,

the horrendous conditions of the British working class in the early days of the industrial

revolution, as immortalized by Charles Dickens and other critics of the time, does not

detract from the fact that this was a wage-earning labor force of freemen and women with

a greater capacity to change and improve their condition than slaves ever enjoyed. In the

study of coolie labor as a form of indentured servitude defined by law and a contract that

coexisted with or succeeded slavery, regardless of the actual treatment they received,

their legal status cannot be ignored. While this status might have had little ameliorating

effect on their day-to-day existence on the plantation, the fact that this intermediate status

between slave and free was formulated at all could have represented a significant

ideological shift on the part of the planters towards imagining a free labor force. Finally,

much work still needs to be done to examine in greater detail the coolies’ relationship

to production, both while under the original contract and especially during the recontracting

and outside contracting (cuadrilla or enganche) periods.

NOTES

' During this period, about 1.5 million Chinese went overseas, to Southeast Asia, North America,

as well as South America and the Caribbean, and other parts of the world. See Amold Joseph

Meagher, “The Introduction of Chinese laborers to Latin America and the “Coolie Trade’ , 1847-

1874.” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation (U.C. Davis, 1975), 55. (This is an excellent piece of

research that should have been published as an important contribution to an aspect of the

international migration of labor in the 19th century.)

The approximately 225,000 Chinese who went to Cuba and Peru were almost exclusively male.

So few women went under contract that they were statistically insignificant. A few women went

as prostitutes (possibly sent from California by enterprising California Chinese businessmen)

or free women. The Cuban census of 1872 noted 58,400 Chinese, of whom only 32 were

females, 2 under contract and 30 free. Of the 34,650 noted in the 1862 census, 25 were females.

Of the 24,068 in the 1877 census, 58 were females (some possibly born in Cuba and Peru). These

figures taken from C. M. Morales papers, vol. 3, #19, Biblioteca Nacional Jose Marti, Havana:

Vidal Morales y Morales, “Inmigracion de chinosen laIslade Cuba. Datos queha proporcionado

el que suscrita a Mr. Sanger, Inspector General del Censo.” (Collection of clippings, n.d.)

Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery. The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830-1920.

London: Oxford University Press, 1974, 113. If Ceylon, Malaysia, the trade before 1842 and

after 1870, and illegal exports were all included, Tinker estimates the number of East Indians

taken overseas to be at least 1 million, possibly as high as 2 million; 114-5.