From plantation to prison: Visual economies of slave resistance, criminal justice, and penal exile in the Spanish Caribbean 1820-1886

During the mid-to-late nineteenth century (1820-1886), the Cuban colonial government transported slaves to Puerto Rico to serve penal sentences in exile. Nearly all of the prisoners had been convicted of acts of homicide against plantation owners, mayorales (overseers), and contra-mayorales (managers) of various estates. The enslaved convicts were connected to resistance movements in Havana, Pinar del Rio, and above all, Matanzas, the sugar-producing core of the island. They served their entire sentences in the Presidio de San Juan, otherwise known as the Carcel de la Princesa, which became a colonial showcase of punitive disciplinary regulation, modeled in many ways after the slave plantation system itself. There, exiled slaves were subjected to a penal regime similar to what they had experienced in Cuba. Indeed, many were taken from confinement proper to labor on the island's defensive fortification projects and road works, above all, to Puerto Rico's Carretera Central, after 1872, whose builders also included Sino-Cuban penal exiles. However, at the same time, similar to enslaved exploits in Cuba, enchained Africans and their descendants equally challenged their oppression while clutched by the juggernaut of Puerto Rican penal control. Hence, examining the overlooked structural inter-connections between these two Spanish colonial territories, this study also firmly looks to conceptualize Resistance proper as a permanent process and therefore as a structure within the theory of capital.;This dissertation is a comparative study of these two built-environments along with the Spanish Peninsula that regulated the social relations of slaves, and how they responded to these regulations, as they became increasingly strident militaristic. The study centers on slaves from Cuba who were condemned to penal servitude. However, as part of the comparative analysis, the investigation also explores the respective development and application of the Bourbon Reforms within Iberian society as a means to unveil the structural homologies and heterologies of the spatial-social operation of global capital during the late-eighteenth to the late-nineteenth century period. I analyze the simultaneous rise of the "industrial" phase of the Cuban ingenio (sugar mill) during the island's exponential augmentation in sugar production, and the "industrial" phase of penal institutions and structures of confinement in Puerto Rico during the same period. This dissertation contends that the process of capital exploitation and labor formation and extraction were practically identical in all three locations and their corresponding foundational logics were one and the same. Furthermore, the parallel emergence and development of the 'industrial plantation' and the 'industrial penal system' thus became central to the process of modernization in the Spanish Caribbean, revealing an ever-increasing U.S. imperial orbit.