6 ideas
Chinese indentured labour in Cuba was neither free wage labour nor chattel slavery, but a hybrid form of bondage. A contract gave it legal cover as voluntary exchange, while coercion, sale, and violence made it work like slavery in practice. Seeing this middle category undoes the neat binary between slave and free that histories of the Americas usually rely on.
The 1874 Cuba Commission's depositions and petitions can be read as a body of first-person 'coolie narratives', similar to slave narratives. Labourers who were supposed to be voiceless used an official inquiry to record kidnapping, deception, torture, and suicide in their own framing. That turns bureaucratic evidence into literature of resistance.
The indenture contract looked like consent and freedom, but it worked as a tool of control. Labourers often signed under fraud or duress, or could not read the terms. Planters then extended terms, withheld wages, and forced re-contracting, so the paper itself kept people in bondage. Reading the contract as a technology of unfreedom shows how liberal legal forms can carry forward the relations of slavery.
In 1874 a Qing-sponsored commission went to Cuba and collected 1,176 depositions and 85 petitions carrying 1,665 signatures, 2,841 testimonies in total. Their collective record helped end the Cuban coolie trade.
Chinese labour was imported to Cuba as British pressure and abolitionism threatened the African slave trade. It let the sugar plantations keep running on unfree labour under a new legal name. Asian indenture was therefore part of how slavery was prolonged, not a clean break or transition to free labour.
Placing Chinese coolies next to enslaved Africans on the same plantations shows shared conditions, cross-racial contact, and a common place in racialized labour hierarchies. It corrects histories that treat Asian migration as voluntary diaspora separate from Black Atlantic slavery. It also shows how racial categories were built to sort and discipline different unfree workforces.