Transitory Trust: Falsified Passports, Circulars, and Other Speculations in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

Abstract

In nineteenth-century Cuba, the increasing and uneven use of passports for maritime travel generated confusion about their authority and encouraged their falsification. This essay explores the forgery and misuse of travel papers alongside the fabrications of an official colonial record that concealed the illegal transatlantic slave trade as it implemented documentary procedures for legal travel. Cuban officials pursued individuals who traveled without passports, with other people’s passports, or lacked other papers, with a disproportionate focus on the circulation of free people of African descent. At the same time, the limited reach of government decrees and policies complicated strict determinations of transgression. Rather than taking this as evidence of a broken system, recognizing how various actors created the conditions for a collective susceptibility both to the authority conferred by passports and to plausible falsehoods lets us view borders, individual identity, and Caribbean mobility in new light. The essay calls on historians to approach the archival record of passports and mobility by balancing our retrospective recognition of falsifications with an awareness of fluctuating estimations of documentary veracity in the past.

The hefty libros de pasaportes in the Cuban national archive would be immediatelyrecognizable to theorists of the state as ambitious, if early, models of rational efficiency and administrative ordering.¹ The registers purport to list every recipient of a passport in Havana from around 1822 to 1898, beginning with small softbound notebooks identifying local residents who stood surety for arriving passengers and becoming, by midcentury, colossal hardbound tomes of over 1,000 pages. The passport books supply the evidence, in numbers and kilos, for the massive expansion in the use of passports, which displaced safe-conduct passes, sea certificates, and letters of introduction as one-time permissions for maritime and cross-border travel during the nineteenth century.²

As comprehensive as they may appear, there is much that the libros don’t tell us. Did everyone who obtained a passport use it to travel? One cluster of entries on May 7, 1824, for example, indicates that twenty-three people identified as morenos libres obtained passports with the destination “Africa”; it ignites the historical imagination to wonder if they ever made the trip, or if bearing passports might have benefited them on the island in other ways.³ The books reveal little about the purposes of the voyages being sanctioned, passports granted in other parts of Cuba, or circulation within the island. Physical descriptions of the recipients appeared on the passports they carried but not in the centralized register. Falsifications and forgeries of passports could often pass unnoticed, both in the libros and in Havana’s harbor. But as a schematic vision of seventy-five years of transit from the island, the libros de pasaportes represent an impressive bureaucratic feat as well an “official secret”—that is, as Max Weber noted, state knowledge kept from the public in order to control its use and prevent its criticism.

What were the particular secrets that the libros held? One was the fragility of the whole endeavor. What appeared to be a standardized system for regulating mobility to and from Cuba guaranteed little consistency in terms of documenting all individuals who came and went, documenting them accurately, and documenting them in ways that port and border authorities elsewhere would recognize. The other official secret, an open one, was that sanctioning “legal” passage provided cover for a thinly documented illegal transatlantic slave trade after 1820. Colonial authorities in Cuba, and those engaged in the trade, left as light a paper trail as possible to avoid scrutiny of voyages to Africa and back. British officials attempting to suppress the trade struggled mightily to obtain access to relevant records, and even if they had made their way to the libros de pasaportes, they would have found scant evidence of the tens of thousands of Africans who arrived in Cuba illegally through the 1860s. Scrutinizing that documentary record, however, could have unmasked the inconsistencies and outright lies that sustained the appearance of a well-oiled machine.

The temptation is strong, then, to mistrust the documentary record of the politics of movement in Cuba. Combined, these instances of falsified records and those deliberately concealed make a strong case for a skeptical reading of sources about Cuba’s history of migration and mobility. After encountering just a handful of cases about falsified passports, a researcher might understandably resist taking for granted the accuracy of the names listed methodically in the passport books; once it becomes clear that colonial authorities acted with deliberate caprice in unevenly documenting mobility, the credibility of the archival record weakens considerably. This poses serious problems for understanding the “golden age of port cities” and a century in which people and information circulated globally at increasing speed and volume.⁴ How powerful is state knowledge that circulates irregularly, or not at all? Does the power lie in the appearance of a functioning system of surveillance? The answers to these questions bear directly on understanding long-distance mobility before the global consolidation of national states and borders. A curious convergence occurred during the nineteenth century: a wide array of Cuba’s inhabitants sought passports when they left the island, and officials in various positions and locales issued them. Yet what authority those documents carried en route was often up for grabs.

This essay is about the relationship between two kinds of falsifications: the forgery and misuse of travel papers and the fabrications of official colonial records, ones that often remained opaque and concealed in their day. It lingers in the gap between the “paper knowledge” generated by the passport registers and passports themselves, a gap that left plenty of room for speculation, fabrication, and forgery, and it questions the presumed authority and widespread circulation of state attempts to manage mobility politics.⁵ There is nothing new about approaching the archival record critically. Historians and other scholars rarely take sources at their word and find in them far more than transparent reflections of empirical truths about the past. Making sense of falsified documents when they appear in an archive, however, requires a slightly more precise awareness of how estimations of veracity themselves change over time. What allows us today to trust a source or recognize a falsification is the product of social technologies that may bear little resemblance to those in other times and places. The purpose of this essay is to understand the social and political effects of falsified records as they affected the ability of people to journey to and from Cuba in the nineteenth century.

Paper Weight

The long-awaited publication in 2018 of Julius Scott’s The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution reiterated how central the themes of migration and mobility have been to Caribbean and Black Atlantic history. Long before transnational history had a name or self-designated practitioners, Scott’s 1986 dissertation carefully followed the “masterless” men and women—sailors, the enslaved, the mobile inhabitants of urban port cities—who repurposed the border-crossing circuits of commerce and war in the late-eighteenth century to establish inter-imperial and inter-island channels of communication. These networks facilitated “the transmission of the excitement of social revolution in the Caribbean,” especially the news of the Haitian Revolution.⁶ Scott led the way for several generations of scholars to study long-distance networks of Afro-diasporic cultural exchange, the entangled worlds of the Spanish, French, British, Dutch, and Danish Caribbean, and the global, epochal impact of the Haitian Revolution. He also shed light on how “scraps of news, conflicting interpretations, elusive facts, and shifting rumors”—what Robin Derby has called fugitive speech—gave voice to the resistant, and sometimes revolutionary, politics of free and enslaved subjects.⁷

Communication stands out as Scott’s primary focus, with close connections drawn between the circulation of ideas and the circulation of people. The Common Wind echoes Caribbeanist scholarship in general in characterizing migration and mobility under colonialism as relatively unrestricted for most free people. The mechanisms that have structured and regulated that circulation have received less attention, in part because the political durability of borders has fluctuated under various imperial and national regimes, even as the geographic borders of the islands remained quite definite.⁸ Scott carefully acknowledges the common wind’s crosscurrents, when suspicions of sedition and rebellion led various islands to restrict arrivals and departures, and he alludes to an intriguing postscript: the strongest influence of the men he referred to as “sailor Negroes” would emerge “later, when officials all over Afro-America moved to suppress this uncontrollable communication of ideas by circumscribing the boundaries of human mobility in the region.”⁹

Indeed, state restrictions on individual mobility crescendoed in the nineteenth-century Caribbean, a suppression of the common wind through the issuance of passports and other travel documents and through sustained attempts to prohibit the disembarkation of foreign free people of color. Writing and paperwork were central to these endeavors. Communication can connote circulation, not just of ideas but of people and things as well—and, in fact, early modern Iberian thinkers considered it just this way.¹⁰ The documentary record of human movement, full of omissions and falsifications, had a material life of its own, with prehistories, afterlives, and significance to the people who issued and held the documents in question. Just as the common wind was not shared exclusively by Caribbean peoples of African descent, state mobility politics in nineteenth-century Cuba aimed to comprehend all people leaving and entering the island (and, often on a separate bureaucratic track, those circulating within the island). In the wake of the Haitian Revolution and during Cuba’s ascent as a slave society, racial difference and legal status conditioned nearly every discussion about who could travel and what permission was necessary.

The variations in the libros de pasaportes over the years resulted in part from changing policies about the documentary requirements for entering and leaving the island. Even when those changes came from the Ministerio de Ultramar in Madrid, they sometimes emerged out of individual cases or in response to ad hoc local modifications. The first systematic attempt by the Spanish to delineate passport procedures laid out vague criteria in an 1818 royal cédula, one year after Spain signed a treaty with Britain to end the transatlantic slave trade by 1820 and when a Comisión Blanca was establishing new settlements in Cuba to encourage white immigration.¹¹ According to the cédula, every person regardless of class (sin distinción de clase) entering or leaving Spain and its dominions required a passport or would be “detained and considered suspicious.” The cédula deputized governors, judges, mayors, and military officers to furnish passports in the name of the captain general. It offered no guidelines about regulating movement within the island itself, which was sometimes the greater concern for local officials vigilant about potential slave rebellions and fugitives. Notably, the cédula made no provision for noting physical identifications; passports only had to list the holder’s name, marital status, age, profession, country of origin, and purpose of travel. In an era before photography and without the list of identifying features that would come to be common in later passports, there was little preventing someone from handing over a passport to someone of similar appearance.

This policy marked a change from eighteenth-century restrictions on circulation that tended to focus on goods passed across imperial boundaries, such that restrictions on people were usually secondary to the flow of commodities.¹² The crews of trading ships might come under occasional scrutiny, but in the case of the slave trade, those who controlled transatlantic voyages were more concerned about accounting for the Africans who were themselves being considered as commodities. Piecemeal provisions authorizing “free trade” in Cuba and anxieties about the circulation of independence-minded colonial subjects in the Spanish Caribbean prevented a uniform policy of surveilling the flow of people and goods.¹³ Royal officials issued passports for ships more often than for individual people, and tensions near the end of the War of Spanish Succession (1701–14) focused at one point on the falsification of such documents. One royal order warned of a man in London calling himself Fernando de Guzmán, from Segovia, who was forging “various passports” that were allowing English trading ships to enter Spanish ports in the Americas. The statement called for increased scrutiny of the passports of arriving ships and a better accounting on Spanish ships for their crews and passengers.¹⁴

Individual passports, with less frequency, presented problems of veracity, as evidenced by letters from two Spanish officials in eastern Cuba in 1761 expressing concern about the falsification of a passport.¹⁵ Other kinds of documents might pass for official permission so long as those carrying and inspecting them recognized their validity. William Taylor’s account of the talented impostor Joseph Lucas Aguayo y Herrera describes how, after spending thirteen years in Cuba serving an Inquisition sentence of hard labor for impersonating a priest, the man returned to New Spain and was arrested in Guanajuato in 1789 on suspicion of leaving the island before his sentence was complete. Aguayo presented a desperate assortment of documents in his defense: two blank certificates of release, a third one in the name of José Montero, a name he had adopted in Cuba to conceal an earlier desertion, and a crudely signed release letter from the governor of Santiago, which, according to Taylor, “served him as a kind of passport, now sprinkled with signatures of officials in the larger towns he passed through” in New Spain.¹⁶ And thus a document that was not a passport could acquire the properties of one, not only through a vagabond’s cunning but also because various functionaries were likely willing to play along. One wonders what kinds of tacit communication happened on the presentation of dubious-looking papers, whether for individuals or for ships; weary authorities might turn a blind eye in order to obtain a bribe or simply to spare themselves the hassle of disputing a document’s authenticity.

Despite all the markers of official sanction, ship passports could be large enough to allow for the addition of new authorizations (perhaps written by port officials, perhaps not) to be scrawled in the margins and eventually folded over and over, like notes passed between twentieth-century schoolkids, to create space for more signatures. So many brief and illegible notations would accumulate that completely different captains and ships might end up sailing on a passport issued for a voyage years earlier.¹⁷ To claim this as a falsification is to assume that the palimpsestic practice violated a norm as opposed to constituting one. Subsequent additions may have represented what Matthew Carey identifies as “possible, plausible falsehoods”: a more or less accepted practice whose purpose was to “muddy the epistemological waters” during a time when fluctuating definitions of contraband, borders, and jurisdiction shaped life and work in the Caribbean.¹⁸

Faking It

Formally speaking, passports to and from Cuba left plenty of room for falsification and misuse. Consider, for example, a handwritten 1816 passport issued to an enslaved man identified as YnHull to travel from St. Augustine to Havana. Generally, women, children, slaves, and servants rarely received their own passports if they traveled with a male head of household, whose passport might note their names or simply “y su familia” or “y dependientes.” YnHull embarked on his solo maritime voyage with an unofficial sheet of paper (as opposed to government-issued papel sellado) with no coat of arms or printed template. Besides the bearer’s name, the document lists only the issuing authority (José María Coppinger, governor of East Florida), the name of YnHull’s owner, the name of the ship and captain, and the date of issue; in other words, it was easily forgeable and transferable.¹⁹ By the 1820s, Cuban passports modified the requirements laid out in the 1818 cédula to include distinguishing physical features (señales particulares or filiaciones), but by far the majority of the personal information that appeared on them related to the captain general, listing every military commendation, honorific title, and previous post that he held. The header served as a reminder of the personalized valence of a bestowed privilege, but it accomplished little in concretizing the identity of the document’s bearer.²⁰

By the 1840s and 1850s, as steam travel increased the volume of maritime traffic and anxieties about slave conspiracies and foreign invasion heightened surveillance of black mobility, new regulations aimed to smooth out inconsistencies in the use of passports. Standardization took priority over rooting out falsification. The captain general’s 1842 bando de gobernación contained at least five articles that touched on procedures for arriving and departing Cuba, making distinct provisions for those who arrived in steamships, those passengers of color who were prohibited from disembarking, and those from countries “where it may not be the custom to issue passports.”²¹ Separate from bandos (public announcements) such as this one, which were intended for distribution across the island, local decisions emerging from individual cases traveled less far but aimed to appear just as authoritative. During the same year that the bando appeared, a free man of color from Santiago misused a passport issued to him to buy fabric in Jamaica for his tailor shop (he visited friends and family in Haiti instead), leading multiple officials to recommend prohibiting all free people of color from receiving passports in the future.²² In 1849, a new hardcover government publication appeared that aggregated new regulations about circulation within and beyond the island, separated into different sections for white travelers, travelers of African descent, and cattle. It made no mention of the restrictions called for in the Santiago case.²³ The net effect of this proliferation of rules was a corresponding proliferation of paperwork. Documented incidents of infractions, inspections, exceptions, and evasions abounded. The libros de pasaportes from this point forward are so large that the staff of the Cuban national archive could not reliably carry them from the stacks to my desk in the reading room, and they worried that the desk could not support the weight of a single book.

What does this archival jackpot really reveal? That the multiple requirements and procedures for traveling to and from Cuba now constituted a cohesive and successful system? That more cases of falsification and evasion than in the past represented greater resistance to that system? A bureaucratic distraction from the illegal slave trade? Or could the longer paper trail be the result of a collective fretfulness, an attempt to do something productive with the cresting anxieties about types of mobility that were becoming harder to control? None of these possibilities seem wholly convincing, and this is where the cases of violations and falsifications become valuable. Rather than judging the migration laws as a paper chase or a paper tiger, as a stark success or failure, it is instructive to follow the queries that made their way to port authorities, the police, and the captain general’s office in order to gauge the degrees of credibility afforded to various travelers and to the rules that supposedly bound them. Three limit cases are particularly illustrative.

Unidentified in the libros de pasaportes, or the archived papers issued and collected during arrivals and departures, are the people who traveled without papers or could not subsequently prove the circumstances of their voyages. This perceived problem motivated the 1844 circular seeking to expel foreign-born people of African descent who were living on the island.²⁴ The effort had already been in effect in specific localities for several years.²⁵ By 1844, nearly all African-descended people in Cuba found themselves under scrutiny as rumors of a conspiracy between enslaved rural workers, British abolitionists, and free people of color fueled a large-scale crackdown. La Escalera, the conspiracy named for the ladder to which many suspects were tied and whipped, provoked a government response that tightened restrictions on circulation with the corresponding goal of restricting the circulation of subversive ideas. It also aimed to extinguish the “twilight space” between freedom and enslavement that black Cubans created, according to Aisha Finch, “by evading the prescribed restriction of mobility.”²⁶

Associations of blackness with foreignness led municipal officials in Santa Clara to the home of Genoveva Tondrón, described in her case file as a parda and a dominicana francesa. They had tracked her down early in 1844 not in search of her passport but for her carta de domicilio, the document that allowed legally arrived foreigners to reside in Cuba for a long duration, and a document normally issued upon verifying a sanctioned arrival.²⁷ In the absence of such a document, authorities had to get creative about justifying their decision to expel or not. Without quick recourse to documents beyond the island—a baptismal register, for example—or information archived near coastal ports of entry, the Santa Clara comisario (police inspector) decided on a simple test: foreign-born black residents had to document that they were Catholic, and if they had no such papers, residents of Santa Clara of good standing had to testify that they were faithful adherents. (As if Catholicism protected against racial reprisal; recall Haiti’s public and formal affiliation with the Catholic Church alongside the “fear of French negroes.”²⁸) Instead of documenting her legal status, Tondrón found two white men—native-born, married, and productive—to testify that they had witnessed her perform “many acts of a true believer.” This was her route to a carta de domicilio, which she received six months later.

Ironically, those foreign-born people of color whose status and circumstances did not afford them an exception to the rules readily received passports to leave Cuba. The libro de pasaportes for 1844 and 1845 lists many hundreds of negros and pardos libres (or pardos ingenuos, a less common term denoting freedom) by their names, places of birth, and their destination, frequently Veracruz, Nassau, or Jamaica “on the first boat that becomes available.”²⁹ Alternative reputational criteria thus may have filled the gaps in procedures for documenting individual identity and regulating mobility, provided that individuals could mount a credible case for “good morals and conduct,” as the captain general’s office conceded for Tondrón. But during the repression following La Escalera, those procedures succeeded as one mechanism for expelling a segment of the Cuban population based on their color and place of birth. Although concerns about falsification evinced the authority ascribed to documents, Tondrón’s case makes clear the alternative methods beyond documentation that could verify a person’s identity: methods that required her to perform her subservience to the twinned authority of the state and whiteness, and, like the black authors of slave narratives, to enfold her story within a folio of white voices that “verified” her worthiness.³⁰

A second case reveals how passports that included physical descriptions could successfully prevent their perceived misuse. When the Spanish merchant brig Oratova landed in Havana from Tenerife in 1847, the “scrupulous identification” (according to the port official) of the 148 passengers turned up four men who were traveling with other people’s passports.³¹ The document for José Hernández described someone with black hair, regular height, and light beard, but the person carrying it was “rather blond, somewhat tall,” and bearing a scar on his forehead and a spot under his left eye. Another man holding a passport for a tall forty-year-old named Alejandro Pérez was estimated to be around twenty-two and short, and eventually admitted to being named Manuel Casero. None of the four men seem to have anticipated getting caught, to the extent that when some were asked their parents’ names (which were listed on the passports), they got the names wrong. When asked to read his passport out loud, one man admitted that he could not read. The officials seemed less concerned that the men did not know the correct documentary requirements than with the possibility that they were military deserters. The passports were too elaborately detailed (a huge coat of arms and a frilly border) to forge easily, so most likely the men had access to the kinds of underground markets for identity papers that existed in many Atlantic port cities. By the 1850s, authorities throughout Cuba more routinely detained arriving passengers who lacked passports.

The third limit case leaves unclear how José Antonio Hernández had been apprehended in 1856 after traveling from Santander, Spain without his own identity papers, but it was a surprising predicament for someone who knew well the importance of documentation for securing reputation and employment. Born in a tiny town near Spain’s border with Portugal, Hernández completed two years of study to be an escribano (public notary), a producer and keeper of official records.³² Unable to find work, he set his sights on Cuba. After obtaining a pass to travel from Madrid to Santander in August, he found himself without the people or papers to vouch for his identity and thus secure him a passport to board a ship. So instead, he somehow obtained a cédula de marinero (sailor’s certificate) bearing the name José Lamelas and then passed unnoticed for two months after arriving in Cuba. It may well have been the kind of work that Hernández sought—a job that required written credentials from potential employers—that exposed his scheme. Once he was discovered, it may have been his familiarity with networks of literacy and education that enabled him to wait out his case at the San Carlos seminary in Havana, where he composed a petition in October defending his actions.³³

In his training as an escribano, Hernández had clearly learned how best to supplicate himself to request a pardon.³⁴ In his “sincere confession” to the captain general, “motivated by his conscience,” he narrated his transgression as a last resort: revised rules for notaries led to a temporary suspension of awarding titles, and since he could not count on his family’s support, he imagined employment in the colonies as the only possible solution. Without someone in Santander to testify to his good name, he thus “made use” of the sailor’s certificate that he “acquired by chance.” Yes, this violated the law, but even worse to Hernández was that it violated his own principles: it forced him “to hide his good name (su nombre de calidad), which his conscience and education oppose[d].” The authorities in Havana adjudicating the case saw the opportunity for an easy resolution when two professors at San Carlos took responsibility for the “youth” and fronted the money for his passage, either back to Spain or to a sugar estate near Matanzas where he had found work. One of the professors claimed to know Hernández’s family in Fuentes de Oñoro—a statement that one official doubted—but at this point the questions of reputation and identity fused with the issue of Hernández’s sincerity. The captain general’s office concluded that “the motive for Hernández’s request for a licencia de tránsito being so plausible, and with people responding with sufficient guarantee, it is very fair that the means be provided to dedicate himself to work.”

It is worth lingering over the word “plausible,” which can indicate praiseworthiness as much as plausibility. In the eyes of those who apprehended him, Hernández had supplied a respectable and believable justification, however dicey, for his use of illegitimate travel documents. His education, color, and gender also helped locate him within the borders of plausibility. An important outcome of the fluctuating nature of passport and mobility regulations was that the line between legitimate and illegitimate documentation became an ongoing matter of debate, open to speculation and to flexibility depending on one’s ascribed social status.

Circular Logics

Genoveva Tondrón may have had no idea that her residency was legally questionable as a foreign-born free person of African descent residing in Santa Clara. Depending on when Tondrón arrived from Hispaniola, simply disembarking from her ship could have violated a legal prohibition, and this was one of the policies that justified the inspections of passports and cartas de domicilio during the 1840s. Restrictions placed on free people in general could change from one year to another, but there were also few guarantees that such limits were enforced or in circulation beyond official circles. Did the constant announcement and re-announcement of mobility regulations do anything more than symbolically consecrate a desired but illusory power relationship?³⁵ How far did decrees in Madrid, Havana, or elsewhere have to reach in order to become the law of the land, or at least more authoritative than local vernacular practices? This was as much of a concern for officials in the nineteenth-century Spanish empire as it should be for historians today.

Locating the origins of the island’s ban on the disembarkation of foreign-born people of African descent poses archival and interpretive challenges that expose a chain of assumptions about the state. Isolated and short-lived prohibitions occurred during the Haitian Revolution in an attempt to block the common wind. In 1790, King Carlos IV at first banned the entry of fugitives from slavery, then subsequently all French slaves, and then all French people of color, policies that, as Ada Ferrer notes, “would be repeated and expanded many times.”³⁶ Havana’s town council blocked exiled troops from St. Domingue—armed black leaders—from coming ashore in 1796.³⁷ In 1803, Santiago’s governor, Sebastián Kindelán, attempted to prohibit the entry of African-descended passengers on ships bringing refugees, but in practice inspectors exercised flexibility.³⁸ Kindelán appeared to be “reiterating” a 1796 bando that prioritized an increase in the population of bozales (African-born slaves).³⁹ A new wave of policies in the 1830s made no mention of these earlier measures. In 1832, concerned with an American ship on its way to Cuba from Jamaica, Captain General Francisco Dionisio Vives cited his previous circular about the dangers of philanthropy and Methodism to “impede the introduction of foreign blacks.”⁴⁰ An 1835 circular warned that free people of color would be taken immediately to a holding area for slaves on their attempt to leave their ship.⁴¹ A royal order on March 12, 1837 announced a prohibition on the disembarkation of foreign-born people of color and provided the language for Article 23 of the 1842 bando de gobernación. And on the recommendation of the Junta de Fomento in Madrid, Captain General Leopoldo O’Donnell repeated “the prohibition that exists” yet again in a May 31, 1844 circular for local authorities.⁴²

The chronology of the ban has obviously caused confusion among historians.⁴³ Determining when it began requires prioritizing a stable authority and wide jurisdiction that the multiple, rhizomatic policies confound. Some of the prohibitions referred to immediate local circumstances and others referenced prior versions of the general principle. When a researcher encounters a single decree, or when a single case cites just one of the measures, it becomes all too easy to take the singularity for granted and build context and explanation around it: correlation becomes causation. (A decree from the 1790s makes the ban “about” the Haitian Revolution; a regulation published in the 1840s thus “resulted” from La Escalera.) But the need to revise a perceived policy genealogy might easily be one expediente away, especially in the civil law tradition, in which legal arguments chose the most appropriate precedents among many to fit the specific circumstances of a case.⁴⁴ Taken together, however, these various measures raise the question of why the ban had to be repeated so often.

Both colonial officials and their historians have used the term “reiterate” to refer to the repetition and reassertion of the same kind of decree. Invocations were frequent: circulars, bandos, royal orders, regulations, and instructions (the most common forms of island-wide announcements) would be reissued, sometimes with reference to their earlier promulgation and sometimes not. One interpretation of the practice is that policies could lie dormant until there was a timely need to restate them. Another is that some proclamations were intended to be temporary and subject to change. An 1838 royal order stipulating rules in Spain for regulating traffic to the colonies, for example, noted that “these measures [should] be considered provisional and dictated by extraordinary circumstances.”⁴⁵ But the most persuasive explanation is also the simplest: decrees had to be reiterated because they were not being publicized and followed.⁴⁶ Circulars and the like did not always circulate widely enough.

For all of its attempts to control the flow of information and people, the Spanish colonial government, probably like most governments, struggled to make its decisions as effective in practice as they often appear retrospectively in the archival record. In 1826, the governor of Santiago explicitly “reiterated” his predecessor’s rules for health inspections of arriving ships in a full-page broadsheet, noting in the first line “the continuing abuse being committed in the disembarkation of passengers of ships that enter this port.”⁴⁷ The uneven flow of information about the ban on free people of color disembarking was evident in the need to reannounce it so frequently. It was also evident, by contrast, in how rapidly the news circulated within the United States and how long it left an impression. The abolitionist newspaper The Liberator was already decrying the ban by the end of 1837, and black abolitionist Martin Delany, who never traveled to Cuba himself, noted in his 1861–62 serialized novel Blake, or the Huts of America “the restrictions being great concerning foreign Negroes and mulattoes.”⁴⁸ Passing or partial awareness outside of Cuba may have been the ban’s clearest success if it dissuaded would-be travelers from trying their luck.

Not all news traveled beyond the island so smoothly, even when news about travel became particularly relevant. Captain General Francisco Lersundi published as a circular for foreign consuls an 1867 royal order amending rules for passports and cédulas de vecindad. He began by complaining about “the continued abuse that captains of sail and steam boats are committing” by “openly defying the Laws of the Country that all should respect.”⁴⁹ Across the island, officials took special interest in policing what they understood as false or subversive information: censors combed newspapers for rumors, sedition, and reports of criminal activity (that could then be punished), and papel sellado requirements attempted to rein in the falsification of official documents.⁵⁰ The inverse project—attempting to establish information that was true and trustworthy—could go awry to the extent that official decrees could come across as discretionary, ephemeral, and speculative.

By the 1850s and 1860s, the government’s battle against the unsanctioned mobility of foreign free people of color appears to have ended in a draw. A clerk in Havana was charged with keeping an index, “to remit to the archive of the Gobierno Superior,” of every individual who sought an exception to the prohibition; in a little over two years (1864–66) he had only listed twenty-three cases.⁵¹ The exceptions themselves often received approval, but not without ample bureaucratic hassle. Andrés García, a sixtyish-year old free man of color from New Orleans, had to wait over two weeks after his arrival in Havana in June 1863 to receive his “papeleta de desembarco.” Port officials interrogated him about his reasons for relocating to Cuba with his wife, reasons that were persuasive enough that the capitán del puerto (harbormaster) himself stood as García’s guarantor.⁵² An even longer review awaited Juan de Dios Jaime, one of the Cuban free men of color who left the island in the wake of La Escalera. A former lieutenant in Havana’s free-colored militia, Jaime was now forty-six years old and returning from Veracruz with his wife and six children, “seeing that the majority of individuals of his class have done the same,” according to a passport inspector in the port. Officials scrutinized Jaime’s story and paper trail to ensure that he had not been involved in La Escalera. (Had they consulted the libro de pasaportes for 1844–45, it would have confirmed what Jaime reported as the exact date of departure seventeen years earlier and the name of the Mexican schooner that transported him with his wife, mother-in-law, and two unnamed pardos libres.⁵³) And in 1870, municipal officials in Cienfuegos squabbled with the British vice-consul and the captain general’s office over whether the prohibition—specifically cited as Article 23 of the 1842 bando—was even still in effect. Three black British merchant marines were strolling around the city when they were arrested. The British vice-consul challenged the thousand-peso fine for each one of them by noting that “for many years the cited bando article seems to have fallen into disuse.” Cienfuegos officials claimed to find nothing “in the archive” modifying Article 23; the captain general’s office clarified that the 1849 passport regulations annulled the prohibition except in cases of ships of war, and then it spontaneously added merchant ships as an exception and ordered the fines to be left in place.⁵⁴ Speculating on the authority of past decisions rendered unstable, out of public view, the practices that could determine the validity of a hard-won identity document.

Papering over Illegality

The final archived conflicts over the prohibition against foreign free people of color occurred during the same years as the closing act of the transatlantic slave trade, which required a parallel project of regulating mobility: on paper, a little of it at least, Spain and its colonial representatives might appear to have been as committed to keeping illegally captive Africans out of Cuba as they were about keeping out the foreign free people of color. In that generous reading, the 1860s might look like a moment of victory for the treaties and decrees that ended the trade and a stalemate for Spain’s ability to control other movements to and from the island. But turning away from the Spanish government’s flattering account of itself during the abolition of the slave trade, a much different account,generated largely by British suppression efforts, makes clear how much that record was suffused with falsifications. For almost five decades, a wide range of Cubans and Spaniards, including multiple captains general, flagrantly disregarded the laws prohibiting the importation of enslaved Africans after 1820. They defied treaties, forged documents, destroyed records, and carried out illegal disembarkations away from the scrutiny of the Anglo-Spanish Mixed Commission, port officials, and scribes.⁵⁵ Perhaps the most vocal reiterations of laws in Cuba came when British abolitionists and diplomats insisted that Spaniards and Cubans do their part to end the trade. A second treaty in 1835 and a third legal intervention in 1845 finally pressured captains general to make “a plethora of decrees and circulars to [their] subordinate officers,” according to Franklin Knight.⁵⁶ If the bureaucratic archive of passports and mobility petitions constituted an official secret out of view from the people being surveilled, the illegal slave trade became its own public secret, providing plausible deniability to British abolitionists and cover for the countless people who carried out the trade through illicit and clandestine channels.⁵⁷

As we have seen, many of the efforts that shaped the mechanisms of mobility in nineteenth-century Cuba depended on the persuasiveness and susceptibility of involved parties. There were limits to what people could get away with and take seriously, whether it was a falsified passport or a restrictive decree, and those limits were by no means absolute. Bringing into view the social epistemologies that shaped how travelers navigated the systemic uncertainty of traversing the Atlantic World turns our attention to the falsifications that enabled, rather than weakened, the circuits that facilitated the illegal slave trade.

Decades after the trade had ended, a white Louisiana doctor recounted the practice of furnishing slave traders with spurious travel documents. In an 1890 essay in Scribner’s, titled “The Last Slave-Ship,” George Howe described events from when he had been a medical student in Natchez, Mississippi in 1858.⁵⁸ Howe was recruited as a ship doctor for a voyage nominally delivering newly freed people in New Orleans to Liberia. Once the ship had departed, he learned that he was actually on a slave-trading vessel that would stop in Cuba on its transatlantic return. After describing his time in Monrovia and the Congo, nearly half of his account concerns his paperless status once he arrived in Cuba. As was common, ships like the one that carried Howe avoided the visibility and suspicion that they would face in major cities and ports. Instead, they unloaded the captive Africans in one of the clandestine locations known through whisper networks, and then they burned the ship and any identifying paperwork to erase all evidence of their illegality.

Once Howe and his colleagues made their way to Havana, they faced a new problem. They had arrived in Cuba illegally, but without their ship, they could not leave in the same manner. To secure a legal itinerary back to Louisiana, Howe searched for a way to obtain fake permits that authorized him and his two colleagues to reside in Havana for one month:

These permits for one month were purchased for us by the Spaniards from an accommodating official, at a cost to them of one doubloon (seventeen dollars) each … My permit represented me as a machinist, the captain’s as a carpenter, and the mate’s as a merchant, there being a number of Americans on the island in those capacities.

Next, Howe waited things out for two weeks, apparently studying the procedures for ship arrivals and departures and waiting until he noticed a U.S. steamship arrive. He took one of the small boats that dotted the harbor out to the steamer and inquired about journeying back to New Orleans. The good news was that the ship was departing the following day and would give him passage. The bad news was that the ship required a passport from him, which in the moment he claimed he possessed but had left where he was staying. When a steamship from New York arrived several days later, bound for Panama, Howe recognized an opportunity:

Two or three days later, a steamer from New York to Panama arrived, with some accident to her machinery which delayed her several days. I went out to her, shortly after her arrival, and saw that a number of her passengers were going ashore to visit the city during the delay of the ship; they could get a permit at a certain place on the wharf and remain a shore if they desired. A happy idea flashed upon me, and I went ashore with them and asked for a permit to visit the island during the stay of the vessel; it cost twenty-five cents and was given to me. I then went to the Captain-General’s office, to the passport department, and stated that I was a passenger on the steamer in the harbor from New York to Panama, destined to San Francisco; that I was an engineer going to California; and while visiting the city on my permit I had met a planter with whom I had made arrangements to take off his sugar crop, and the season was near at hand; that some new machinery was needed in the sugar-house, which could only be procured in the United States in time for use that season, and that it would be necessary for me to return to New Orleans by the Panama steamer now due. I therefore asked for a passport, as the steamer could not take me without one. The clerk said those things were of frequent occurrence and soon had my passport ready, describing me very accurately—my height, color of hair and eyes, condition of teeth, etc. Hurrying to the hotel I related my experience to the American captain and mate, who concluded to try their luck in the róle of homesick and discontented gold-seekers anxious to return to their home in the states. Both of them got into a boat, were taken out to and around the ship to the place of landing spoken of, obtained their permits, and together went to the passport office declaring themselves disgusted with the idea of going to California, and desiring to go back home via New Orleans, on the steamer reported due in a day or two. They obtained their passports and came to the hotel, where, in our well-closed room, a bottle of wine was opened and a toast drank to the success of my scheme.

Howe and his colleagues almost effortlessly fabricated new identities that an officer in the captain general’s palace readily corroborated when he provided them with passports, no questions asked. A shared understanding of the profile of U.S. visitors to Cuba allowed for the creation of a credible fiction that quickly acquired documentary verification and legal cover. The conditions of plausibility that Howe and others encountered upon finding themselves paperless in a foreign country favored whiteness and engagement in a valuable productive endeavor that was not slave labor. Contrast how easily Howe and his colleagues slipped into their roles with the strenuous efforts of Genoveva Tondrón, the so-called “dominicana francesa” who in 1844 had to find two white men to testify to how well she played the devout and obedient role expected of foreign-born free women of color. Howe’s self-forgery in pursuit of fabricated identity papers found a sympathetic audience in at least one official willing to look the other way and in another official familiar both with the “rôles” played by U.S. visitors and with the unavoidable fungibility of passports. Both performances were rewarded with identity documents.

Howe’s charade simultaneously undermined whatever integrity contemporaries may have claimed for the passport “system,” and also successfully mastered a dominant script. He excelled at the art of “knowing what not to know,” in Michael Taussig’s memorable phrasing; he knew not to state the obvious—that he was implicated in the slave trade—and instead outlined that fact “with the spectral radiance of the unsaid.”⁵⁹ Nearly all involved parties shared the historically situated assumption of the importance of documentation, but they also knew well what the written record had to say and what it should never say.⁶⁰

Conclusion

In a recent reflection on the political potential of gossip, Judith Butler posits susceptibility as a ground for solidarity. She does so in terms resonant with the forms of fugitive speech that Robin Derby identifies as “primary sources for Caribbean historical research.”⁶¹ Butler notes how gossip “generates a way of knowing, it makes possible a form of recognition, and it facilitates a mode of belonging,” rendering parties “susceptible to one another, registering each other at a level that is less concerned with establishing truth than” with giving something “the status of shared reality.”⁶²

Moving from the psychic and intimate realm that concerns Butler to the comparatively drier bureaucratic realm of paper knowledge, susceptibility becomes a useful category for making sense of putatively dominant forms of communication as much as their fugitive counterparts. The fallibility of passports and other state attempts to communicate individuals in nineteenth-century Cuba could sometimes be painfully obvious. As comprehensive as the libros de pasaportes appear to be, the fraud perpetrated by George Howe and others places in relief how easily passport procedures could become a sham. The misuse and falsification of documents by many parties were often within reach, and yet the collective susceptibility to fraud often seemed to stimulate commitment to (if not solidarity with) documenting mobility rather than diminishing it. To repurpose Butler’s language, the use of passports generated ways of knowing, made possible forms of recognition, and facilitated modes of belonging, but it did so as much through their misuse as through hidebound state designs that often remained official secrets.⁶³

For as flawed as passports can appear in hindsight, dismissing their significance outright avoids explaining their ubiquity in the nineteenth century.Denied to those illegally enslaved, and with scrutiny disproportionately falling on free people of African descent, identity documents often determined how far people could move from their geographic and social locations. This development came precisely as the idea of a network was becoming a concept to express collective and long-distance connectivity, well before nation-states and an international standardization of their passport procedures were hegemonic.⁶⁴ Decrees and regulations issued to systematize the circulation of people struggled themselves to circulate in anything as regular or pervasive as a network, but this was a feature, not a bug, of colonial government. An awareness of such conditions, in which historical actors might find good reasons to find a passport or a circular credible, lays the groundwork to read the archival record for susceptibility and to resist the default mode of empirically-based skepticism.⁶⁵

When we take seriously the indeterminacy and instability of falsifications, we might also think differently about the Cuban state in the nineteenth century.⁶⁶ Caricatures of colonial or “pre-modern” rule as either an unyielding surveillance and classification regime, on one hand, or the poor imitation of an idealized modern bureaucratic state, on the other hand, disintegrate when we try to understand the fictions of self and state behind falsified documents, maintaining official secrets, and other sleights of hand.⁶⁷ Bearing in mind the complex ways that documents like royal orders, second-hand cédulas, and libros de pasaportes circulated, the appearance in an archival expediente of a lone copy of a circular is not proof of its authority (what if no other copies circulated beyond the archive?) any more than the appearance of a rumor or falsification in an official report demonstrates “the melancholy recognition of its own failure.”⁶⁸ The material histories of mobility documents shaped their meanings, and through this lens new relationships between the circulation of information and the circulation of people begin to appear on the horizon.⁶⁹

I want to express deep appreciation, for their conceptual vision and for their patience, to Sarah Foss, Vanessa Freije, and Rachel Nolan, the coeditors of this special issue and the co-organizers of the workshop at Columbia University from which it emerged. I also thank the other participants in that workshop for their collaboration. Camillia Cowling, Anne Eller, Matt Karush, Dixa Ramírez, Lisa Surwillo, La Patrona Collective, and an anonymous reader offered key insights that guided my revisions, as did audiences at the University of Miami and Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. As a participant in the Folger Shakespeare Library 2018–19 colloquium “Finance, Race, and Gender in the Early Modern Atlantic World,” directed by Jennifer Morgan, I rethought much of what I have learned about Atlantic connections, and I thank members of that colloquium for digging into the details together. I am grateful to the staff of the Hispanic Reading Room at the Library of Congress for their support and especially the staff at the Archivo Nacional de Cuba in Havana for their ongoing generosity, not least of which was the taxing physical labor of retrieving the many libros de pasaportes that inform this essay.

Endnotes