In Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery, Rebecca Scott writes that at the most basic level, violence played a key role in the transition from slavery to freedom in Louisiana through the Civil War. While Louisiana was under Union occupation, the presence of black soldiers played a key role in encouraging freedpeople to agitate for their rights. Later, freedpeople insisted on their public rights in order to assert themselves after years in which white authorities denied them. Even in the face of armed resistance and massacres, like that at the Colfax Courthouse, African Americans remained committed to asserting their basic rights in a free Louisiana. Finally, the elections of 1874 and 1876 demonstrated the deeply partisan nature of Louisiana politics through intimidation and opportunism.
Scott writes, “In central Cuba, the interplay of free, enslaved, and smei-enslaved (including indentured Chinese workers) was almost continuous.” Slaves were in constant contact with “Chinese contract laborers who worked at the same tasks but under different rules.” Later, during the Ten Years’ War, the Spanish military treated free blacks and indentured Chinese equally, as a force for labor or a “runaway” group to be captured and put to work. Later, the 1887 census included the Chinese as persons of color. By the very presence, Chinese laborers offered an alternative to slave labor and the roles available to free blacks. Following emancipation, Chinese Cubans could act as electors in the new post-slavery society, demonstrating their assimilation.
Scott writes, “The key legacy in both Cuba and Louisiana was a contest over the right to respect and resources, which increasingly encompassed a contest over the boundaries of citizenship…Louisiana is distinguished from Cuba by the ways in which the scope of this contest came to be successively narrowed.” In Louisiana, “the effects of constitutional disenfranchisement were at once practical, symbolic, and punitive, and they were deigned to undercut alliances along and across class lines – permanently.” African Americans’ political gains resulted from a war that divided the white citizens of Louisiana and the nation, so their disenfranchisement helped to reunify whites in the North and South. In Cuba, the dominant national narrative of a raceless society worked to undermine attempts to unify along racial lines. While this limited Cubans of color from forming their own alliances, as in the case of the Independent Party of Color, “voting and officeholding by men of color were now commonplace” after 1898. Scott writes, “The official ideology of the rebels portrayed racism as a legacy of slavery and colonialism, destined to be eliminated in a democratic Cuban republic.” ( )

12

9