Estado, notarios y esclavos en Cuba

The article analyses different levels of presentation of slaves in Cuba in the graphical spaces of the system of “writing the slavery”. Beginning with notarians and priests, the personal who produced the most important documents with their formal writings (in Spanish: escribanos), the article leads the lectors through different types of the documentation of slavery (certificates of baptisms, notaries protocols of buying and selling, manumission, certificates of freedom, wills, etc.). With the abolition of slavery in Cuba (1880-1886), the escribanos construct from elements of graphical representation of the slaves a “civil name” (first name and one of the first surnames of one of the last owners as first last name) and the ex slaves will be registered on huge scales as “new citizens” in the recently founded registry offices (French: bureaux de l’état civil). So the former levels of representation can be seen as a “genealogy” of this new citizenship. After the abolition the ex slaves and now new citizens enter as agents the notaries’ offices (agency) and influence their own representation in the graphical spaces of the Post-Emancipation , for example in wills and protocols of selling and buying land and houses, in some cases also in the documentation of individual genealogies and proper names. The notaries and escribanos react with the invention of new racial markers