Voices of the Enslaved in Nineteenth-Century Cuba, originally published as La esclavitud desde la esclavitud (Mexico 1996 and Havana 2003), powerfully bears witness to the lives of enslaved Africans and their descendants in nineteenth-century Cuba. It presents a selection of around eighty documents garnered from Cuba's National Archive which shed light on topics from the labour regime of rural and urban slaves, to violence and punishment, to enslaved claims-making and the evolution of slave law, to the conspiracies and rebellions that kept slaveholders awake at night. Unlike in the United States, historians of Cuba have virtually no writings by slaves or former slaves on which to draw. Thus Cuba's rich archival sources become even more crucial in tracing the histories of enslaved people, often neither literate nor native speakers of Spanish.

These difficulties, and the mediating role of lawyers and scribes, mean that rarely, if ever, do we have access to slaves’ experiences in their own words. Nonetheless, the kinds of document held in this collection come about as close as we are ever likely to get. García's comprehensive introduction provides a helpful overview of some of the themes emerging from them, but it is the documents themselves that are the undisputed stars of the show. Nancy L. Westrate's meticulous translation has rendered the lengthy sentences and formalistic language of nineteenth-century Spanish into direct, readable English without losing their original flavour.

As a result, to read this book is to undergo a roller coaster ride of emotions, painfully probing the raw, lacerated underbelly of slave society. Its supremely human stories leap off the pages, burning with fierce love, smouldering jealousy, and abiding commitment to family, as well as with searing anger, stern pride, and terrible betrayal. They illustrate the endless range of creative responses by individuals and communities to the daily realities of forced labour. The more graphic accounts of the violence that was synonymous with slavery make difficult reading, even for those of us who deal with it regularly. In this sense, the documents do exactly what primary sources ought to do, reminding historians of the urgency of our task and the many questions we have left unresolved, and sending us back into the archives in search of answers.

For teachers of Latin American history in English-speaking countries, the volume will be invaluable as a means of bringing crucial primary documents to non-Spanish-speaking students. The documents are, of course, rich teaching aids almost as much for their tantalizing silences as for the information they present. To what degree do they really express enslaved “voices”? Who were the translators who rendered the words of multiple African informants into Spanish? What about the use of torture to extract information, as implied by one document which covers the conspiracy of 1844, in which at least seven of the slaves being investigated actually died before the proceedings were over (187–91)?

Meanwhile, for those embarking on research projects on nineteenth-century Cuban slavery, these documents offer a tiny taste of the riches of Cuba's vast and well-organized National Archive. Scholars interested in the view from the east of the island, as opposed to the west and central regions that tend to dominate histories of nineteenth-century slavery, will also need to turn beyond the National Archive, upon which this collection exclusively draws, to the country's impressive array of local and provincial archives (see The Archives of Cuba/Los archivos de Cuba, ed. Louis A. Pérez Jr. and Rebecca J. Scott, 2003).

The book's emphasis on looking beyond the enduring dichotomy of “accommodation” versus violent “resistance” was perhaps especially important when it was originally published. Thanks, in good measure, to the work of García herself, scholars based on and off the island have made important inroads over the last fifteen years in understanding some of the themes the book traces: the evolution of the law, slave family and demography, African cultures and ethnicities, and gender relations among the enslaved. Ada Ferrer's brief Foreword indicates some of this literature, but the volume would have benefited from a fully revised introduction by the author, situating it within the new scholarship which it has itself helped to generate.

Given the practical difficulties faced by scholars on and off the island in accessing each other's work, the task of making Cuban scholars’ works more widely accessible in the United States and internationally is especially important. It is to be hoped that those of us studying Cuba from the outside remember to follow suit, publishing our work in Spanish on the island. The University of North Carolina Press is to be commended in promoting this international exchange, allowing an important work like Voices of the Enslaved to be heard by new listeners.