Slavery and spatial dialectics on Cuban coffee plantations

Slaveholders manipulated the spatial organization of plantations to their advantage in an effort to control the actions of enslaved workers. Slave workers, on the hand, always found ways to resist planter hegemony. Cuban slaveholders, not only employed surveillance measures comparable to those found elsewhere in the Americas, but they also housed enslaved people in prison-like quarters. Using both archaeological data and written sources, this essay examines plantation slavery in Cuba by analyzing the dialectal relationship between slaveowners' control of plantation space and enslaved laborers' resistance of that control.