From Colonial Cuba to Madrid

This book examines freedom and native based rights through a unique collective suit filed by hundreds of Afro descendant litigants in colonial Cuba. Crossing various disciplines, it will interest students and scholars of the African diaspora, Afro-Latin America, slavery, the Spanish empire, legal studies, and the age of revolutions.

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From Colonial Cuba to Madrid examines the largest and most complex freedom suit litigated in the highest court of the Spanish empire at the end of the eighteenth century. Filed by hundreds of re-enslaved Afro descendant people who had lived in quasi-freedom in eastern Cuba for more than a century, this action drew on local customary practices and broader cultural, political, and legal discourses rooted in the Spanish Atlantic world to put forward novel claims to collective freedom and native based rights at a time when questions of slavery, freedom, and citizenship were igniting in many parts of the Atlantic world. Intersecting law, society studies, and the history of slavery, María Elena Díaz offers a carefully researched study of one of the few communities of Afro descendants that managed to secure freedom and political and legal recognition from the Spanish crown during the colonial period.