‘The Other Side of the Slave Labour Coin’

Abstract This article investigates labour production through the relationship between slave control and penal confinement in Cuba and Puerto Rico for the period 1820–1886 within the context of the Bourbon Reforms in Spain. It examines the structural similarities in the day-to-day operation and punishment of enslaved convicts in Puerto Rico and enslaved Africans in Cuba. By juxtaposing Iberian, Cuban, and Puerto Rican cases, the article argues that slavery and penal servitude functioned as mutually reinforcing regimes of coerced labour within a single Spanish imperial logic of racialized social control. It demonstrates the overlooked homologies and heterologies within Spanish Caribbean historiography in slave studies and corresponding labour histories. The analysis problematizes the unitary and conventional historiographical constructions of slave and penal labour in different locales and emphasizes the failure of orthodox conceptual and historical analyses of labour production to focus on the co-functioning processes of coercive labour throughout the Caribbean basin. By comparing slave and penal labour as they took place in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the argument is that the processes of capital exploitation and labour extraction were reciprocal in nature, making these essentially the same and centrally predicated on the taxonomy of race.