The middle decades of the nineteenth century were a volatile period in the history of Cuban slave society: the transatlantic slave trade peaked, waned and then surged again right before its suppression in 1867, planters and the state turned to other forms of coerced labour as a complement to slavery, and both annexationism and separatism destabilised politics. One of the central events in this period demonstrated just how conflictive colonial society was: the Conspiracy of La Escalera, which sought to abolish slavery and to bring Spanish rule to an end, and the subsequent violent repression carried out by the Spanish state in 1843 and 1844. The authorities especially targeted Cuba's large population of free people of colour, the subject of Michele Reid-Vazquez's The Year of the Lash. Reid-Vazquez aims to show on the one hand how free people responded to new measures of repression and discrimination after La Escalera and, on the other, how the state sought to reshape colonial society in the conspiracy's aftermath. What emerges is a revealing study of the narrowing parameters of freedom in one of the major plantation societies of the nineteenth century.

Spain's Caribbean colonies were the first New World territories to turn to the transatlantic slave trade in the early sixteenth century, but the traffic was always highly regulated and held in check by the Spanish crown. Thus, while there were always slaves in Cuba and other Spanish islands, these were not slave societies like the British and French colonies that flourished in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This situation was reversed beginning in the late eighteenth century: slaves dismantled slavery in Haiti, while British abolitionists suppressed the slave trade to the West Indies. At the same time, the Spanish crown, seeking to reap the fortunes that had heretofore accrued to its rivals, deregulated the slave traffic to its Caribbean colonies. Nowhere did this new policy bring about greater changes than in Cuba, which would eventually become the world's largest producer of cane sugar.

Several recent works have explored the tensions wrought in Cuba by the expansion of the slave trade and the plantation – for example, Matt Childs’ The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery (University of North Carolina Press, 2006). What they have found is a sharp contradiction between the society that had developed in Cuba over the centuries and the new demands of the full-blown slave society that Cuba was becoming. Reid-Vazquez successfully works in this vein of scholarship, showing us in careful detail the pressures felt by Cuba's large free black population as both the colonial state and local elites sought to minimise its historical prerogatives and marginalise its role in the Cuban economy.

While such efforts were ongoing over the course of the nineteenth century, the aftermath of La Escalera formed a particular moment of intense conflict and repression. Reid-Vazquez focuses on several topics to highlight the new forms of repression and, most importantly, how free people responded to them. The repressive measures included expulsion from the island, discrimination in employment, suppression of the free black militia, greater policing of the cabildos de nación, and official encouragement of European, Mayan and Chinese immigration (the latter two groups as forced labourers) to correct the colony's perceived racial imbalance.

Throughout, Reid-Vazquez draws upon rich research in several archives, including the Archivo Nacional de Cuba in Havana, the Archivo General de Indias in Seville and the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid. While such sources tend to reflect the perspectives and interests of the colonial regime and its functionaries, the author is able to glean persuasive evidence of how those targeted by repressive and discriminatory policies were able to deflect and sometimes to subvert them.

Chapter 5, on the vicissitudes of the militias after La Escalera, is especially enlightening. Free black military service was of long standing in Cuba and other Spanish colonies and had become especially important, and coveted, during the escalation of inter-imperial warfare in the eighteenth century. Those who served received special legal and financial privileges, as well as heightened social status. However, no matter how useful and effective the free black militias were in the eighteenth century, by the nineteenth century they had come to be a thorn in the side of the state and the planter class. The government suppressed them in the aftermath of La Escalera, but then felt the need to revive them a decade later. One reason for this was that Cuba's governors were in constant search of more military manpower from mid-century onward, at first to resist filibustering campaigns from the United States and later to combat independence movements in Cuba.

The captain-general's office thus felt that it could not do without the militias. In contrast, Reid-Vazquez finds, free black Cubans felt that they could. What was once a privilege had become a penalty, as the government tried to implement a draft. The author demonstrates that resistance to the draft was, if indirect, nonetheless pervasive and effective. She focuses on the hundreds of petitions filed for exemption from service, arguing that they show how free blacks strategised to avoid the government's demands, to such a degree that by the 1860s, the government had decided to do away with the militias once and for all.

Reid-Vazquez effectively shows us how the responses to the reconfigured militia capture the situation of free people of colour in the mid-nineteenth century. Though the state's response to La Escalera sought to curtail the freedoms and autonomy exercised over the centuries by free blacks, ‘it did not paralyze them’ (p. 175). Indeed, as the wars of independence that broke out in 1868 would show, it motivated many of them to fight openly against a colonial regime that had come to treat them as enemies.