This book examines the evolution of coartación—a form of manumission whereby an enslaved person paid for their freedom in installments—in nineteenth-century Cuba. Claudia Varella and Manuel Barcia trace its transformation from a relatively uncontroversial form of manumission rooted in custom to its emergence as a site of conflict encapsulating wider crises of the second slavery era. Whereas other scholarship has focused on coartación in Cuba as a site of resistance and a basis for enslaved people to make legal claims, Varella and Barcia instead focus on its place in wider Cuban society and its implications for the meanings of freedom and property. The book's main argument is that coartación in nineteenth-century Cuba paradoxically rendered legal freedom little more than an illusion. Coartados (those so manumitted) remained in a precarious liminal space between slavery and freedom, compounded by the competing interests of the state, slave owners, notaries, and síndicos.

In 1842, Cuba's Reglamento de Esclavos codified enslaved peoples’ right to coartación and their right to demand a change in owner. The Reglamento sought to impose state control over the relationship between enslaved people and owners in terms of manumission. One might expect that these newly codified rights would have expanded access to legal freedom, but the reality was much more complex. The authors begin from the premise that a definitive, quantitative study of coartación is impossible because “the titles or deeds that would have ensured that an enslaved person was truly coartado went largely unformalized” (13). The failure to record coartación in a systematic way preserved slave owners’ mastery over coartados and rendered them vulnerable to the whims and interests of corrupt notaries. The high internal demand for slaves at the time the 1842 Reglamento was executed meant that slave owners responded by finding ways to squeeze more money out of coartados to prolong their enslavement, a tactic that was facilitated by inconsistent and informal recordkeeping.

The precarity of coartación was compounded by state representatives and institutions that were, in theory, charged with protecting the rights of coartados. A major figure studied in the book is the síndico, an appointed “legal protector and defender” of enslaved people who facilitated the process of coartación and arbitrated conflict outside of the court (148). But as coartados initiated complaints or sought fair appraisals of their market value, síndicos placed them in the judicial custody of the state, sometimes in charitable institutions, from which they entered an urban rental market. In the process, their rights and status as coartados evaporated. In exploring the role of the state in coartación, the authors reveal how freedom's conditionality was managed, bureaucratically and institutionally.

Varella and Barcia conclude that coartación amounted to little more than “false manumission,” because relatively few coartados obtained their full legal freedom (146). This is an inescapable conclusion, given the overwhelming evidence that slave owners, síndicos, and notaries exploited coartados and ignored the rights conferred by their coartado status. But this conclusion prompts a deeper question: given its starkly exploitative nature, why did enslaved people pursue coartación at all? Because coartación clearly was not forced on enslaved people, readers are left wondering what coartados imagined was possible when they put a down payment on freedom. One possible answer, gleaned from examples in the book, is that enslaved people were acutely aware of coartación's logic and used the process to achieve other kinds of freedoms, protections, privileges, and customary rights (79, 83-4, 149). By focusing more on these strategies and even incorporating the scholarship on conditional freedom in other parts of Latin America, the authors could have deepened their analysis of why enslaved people initiated a process that paradoxically placed freedom further out of reach.

As the first full-length study of coartación, this is an exhaustively researched, insightful contribution to the history of manumission. It challenges many assumptions and misconceptions about coartación in Cuba, broadens our understanding of legal freedom's wrenching conditionality, and reminds us that the paths to manumission were rarely linear.