First, maroons in the two islands virtually shared a common space. One of the centers of maroon activity in the Spanish colony, the steep and densely wooded Sierra Maestra ranging along the east–west coastline at Cuba’s southeastern tip, was a short sail from the edge of Jamaica’s “cockpit country,” and from points high in the sierra the peaks of the British island’s Blue Mountains were actually visible.14 The short distance between the two islands concerned Spanish officials, who feared that communities of runaway slaves in the Sierra Maestra might make common cause with hostile British forces in Jamaica.15
One chapter of the common history of maroons in Jamaica and Cuba was written in the 1730s, when the timing of the First Maroon War in Jamaica coincided exactly with a similar uprising among slaves working near the east coast of Cuba. In 1731, at precisely the time when the rebels in Jamaica were beginning their armed struggle for independence, slaves in the state-run copper mines near Santiago de Cuba revolted en masse and took to the mountains east of the city, near the present-day site of El Cobre. Like their counterparts in Jamaica, these so-called cobreros managed to resist repeated attempts to dislodge them and caused considerable concern for the planters in the valley below. By the 1780s, descendants of the original rebels, now numbering more than a thousand, had fanned out from El Cobre into smaller settlements scattered throughout the surrounding sierra.16 Again during the 1790s, the cycle of unrest and official anxiety over maroon activity affected Cuba as much as Jamaica. Governors of Santiago de Cuba, now heavily involved in Cuba’s full-fledged and growing investment in African slave labor, reported that their best efforts to bring the cobreros under control had failed. In fact, by the middle of the decade, El Cobre welcomed all kinds of fugitives from slavery, “cobreros as well as other slaves,” and was home for several infamous characters who had been on the run for years.17 Apprehensive that the Jamaican Maroon War of 1795–96 would spread to the Cuban mountains, as it apparently had in the 1730s, Cuban officials did not hesitate to show solidarity with their British neighbors; when the Jamaica Assembly requested that the Cubans send a number of their fierce tracking dogs and chasseurs to bring the rebels under control, they complied with uncharacteristic dispatch.18
During this uncertain and active period, mobile cobreros built a network of news and rumor which stretched even across the Atlantic. In the 1780s, Spanish authorities could not control rumors that the king had finally granted freedom and land to the cobreros only to have his wishes thwarted by the resistance of local officials. Convinced that slaves should have independent sources of transatlantic information, a small group of cobreros delegated Gregorio Cosme Osorio to travel to Spain in order to represent the interests of the descendants of El Cobre’s runaway slaves at court. Osorio’s reports helped to keep the spirit of resistance alive into the mid-1790s. By 1795, Juan Baptista Vaillant, the governor of Santiago de Cuba, reported that a new wave of liberation rumors was sweeping the east coast of Cuba and that slaves were deserting plantations in disturbing numbers. Governor Vaillant blamed the wide circulation of several recent letters from Osorio for these developments.19
The geography of Saint-Domingue, with its rugged and majestic mountain ranges rimming the colony’s long and jagged eastern border, also presented mobile slaves ample opportunity for escape. After 1700, maroon activity grew and expanded as rapidly as plantation slavery itself. Early in the century, bands of maroons inhabited the region surrounding the rich northern plain. By mid-century, the center of maroon activity had shifted southward along the rim of mountains overlooking the new boom areas of Mirebalais, Cul-de-Sac, and Anse-à-Pitre. Though marronage was a significant factor affecting the character of the slave system throughout Saint-Domingue, the east-central region between the Cul-de-Sac and the Spanish border would continue into the era of the Revolution to be the locus of the most stable maroon societies as well as the scene of continuous warfare between maroons and government-sponsored expeditions. As the rule of the slavocracy entered its final days in the 1780s, maroon groups of various sizes and descriptions stretched in a broken line from the northernmost reaches of Saint-Domingue all the way to its southern tip. The role of these Haitian maroons in advancing the coming revolution remains a topic of intense debate.20
The activities of Saint-Domingue’s maroon societies focused greater planter concern, but the tradition of short-term individual desertion was arguably of more consequence in the day-to-day functioning of plantations and among the slaves themselves. Whether visiting relatives, escaping an impending punishment, or engaging in trade and other proscribed activities, slaves who left for absences of short duration and distance bedeviled managers on every plantation. Proprietors and overseers became so accommodated to short-term absences from their plantations and so powerless to control them that they often did not even bother to delete the names of absent slaves, especially those of habitual leave-takers, from current plantation lists.21 In addition, overseers frequently reported finding runaways from other area plantations hiding out in the quarters of their slaves. In 1790 the overseer of one plantation in the Cap Français district arrested twenty-seven fugitive slaves in his vicinity within a short time, “as many in the slave huts as in the hills.”22 Already, however, the relaxed attitude of the days before the arrival of the news of the French Revolution had begun to give way to new fears about what this news might mean to plantation slaves. By 1790, whites recognized the possibility that rebellion might spread easily to the countryside, and that they could ill afford to ignore even these short-term migrants any longer.23
While the mountains and backwoods with their maroon communities provided hope in the popular imagination regarding individual escape and collective resistance throughout the eighteenth century, the growing coastal cities nurtured the most complex patterns of mobility and presented the most vexing problems of control for all the colonial powers. Caribbean cities were more than centers of commercial exchange, population, and government; they were in a real sense centers of education. Towns provided anonymity and shelter for a wide variety of masterless men and women, including but by no means restricted to runaway slaves, and they offered unique opportunities for these people to rub shoulders, share experiences, and add to their knowledge of the Caribbean world and beyond. By the 1790s, larger cities like Kingston, Cap Français, and Havana could properly be termed capitals of Afro-America, and dissidents in dozens of smaller coastal centers were engaging in the kinds of transactions which would play a crucial role in spreading the excitement of the Age of Revolution in the Caribbean.
At the start of the eighteenth century, however, these cities presented a very different picture. In 1700, Havana, with its impressive stone cathedrals and fortifications, had few rivals in the region. The future urban centers of the British and French Caribbean were fledgling settlements more closely resembling the “overgrown villages” of the eastern seaboard of British North America than the established capitals of the Spanish and Portuguese. Only about two thousand people inhabited Kingston, the city founded to replace Port Royal in 1692, at the turn of the eighteenth century. Similarly, Cap Français, destined to become Saint-Domingue’s most important city and later the revolutionary capital of the Caribbean, had only recently inherited its role as a locus of settlement from buccaneering La Tortue across the channel. At the time of the founding of Kingston, “le Cap” was home for only 160 white men, sixty-three white women, and thirty-four black slaves, and twenty years later the town still contained barely a thousand residents.24
The progress of cash crop agriculture in the region between 1700 and 1790 transformed these settlements in both size and function. Surviving periodic natural disasters and incessant warfare, these and other coastal centers had grown significantly by the era of the Haitian Revolution. A generation of intense economic activity and reform after 1763 found Havana by 1791 a teeming entrepôt whose population, including the web of surrounding suburbs, ranged somewhere between 44,000 and 50,000. The city continued to expand during the years of the revolution in Saint-Domingue, doubling in size between 1791 and 1810. Other Spanish-American cities, most notably Caracas, whose population almost doubled between 1772 and 1812, and Buenos Aires, experienced similar rapid development as population and trading centers.25 By 1790, Kingston was the hub of overlapping networks of regional and transatlantic trade in the British orbit; of all the cities
