Chinese Indentured "Coolie" in Holguin, Cuba, Official Government Contract of an Identified 37 Year Old Chinese Man, January 1868

Cuba Labor Chinese Indentured Servant

Manuscript & Autographs

[Cuba] [Chinese] [Labor] Cuban indentured servant contract documenting the state administration of Chinese indenture in eastern Cuba in January 1868, with direct evidence of how colonial authorities, private employers, and local officials formalized the re-contracting of Chinese laborers under the legal framework established after the 1860 royal decree regulating Asian colonos on the island. Printed references within the form cite the Reglamento aprobado por Real decreto de 6 de Junio de 1860 and the Circular del Gobierno Superior Civil de 27 de Marzo de 1861, placing the document squarely within the coercive labor regime that Spanish Cuba built after the suppression of the transatlantic slave trade. The named employer Antonio Gonzalez, the identification of the worker as a 37 year old Chinese male "[Yuet?]", and the required signatures and government seal make the sheet a concise administrative record of the contract system through which Cuban planters and officials bound Chinese workers to plantation and rural labor in the final decade before the Ten Years' War.
Tenencia de Gobierno de Holguín. January 1868. One page printed and manuscript contract form, approximately 8" x 11". Printed in Spanish with extensive manuscript completion in brown ink. The form opens “Contrata que celebran el colono…” and records a renewed labor agreement between a Chinese colono, identified in the contract and Don Antonio Gonzalez, with manuscript entries identifying the laborer as 37 years of age and supplying the individualized terms of service. The printed clauses set out the structure of the contract in eleven numbered articles, including the term of service, compulsory labor under the employer’s orders, days and hours of work, subjection to discipline under the Reglamento, monthly salary of 14 escudos, food and clothing provisions, medical attendance and hospital care, treatment during illness, and the requirement at the end of the contract either to renew service or enter the depósito de cimarrones. The sheet is signed by the patron, the colono, and the Teniente Gobernador, and bears the circular official stamp of the Tenencia de Gobierno at lower left, with additional show-through and seal impression visible on the verso.
By 1868, Chinese indenture in Cuba had become one of the island’s central labor systems, supplying workers to a plantation economy still structured by slavery while giving colonial officials a paper mechanism for disciplining, reallocating, and surveilling labor. Forms such as this show the overlap between private contracting and state enforcement: the worker’s obligations are written into a government template, disputes are reserved to local authority, and illness, wages, food, clothing, and renewal are all treated as administrative matters within a coercive labor order. Very good condition, with horizontal fold, light toning, minor scattered staining and foxing, and strong printed text, manuscript entries, seal, and signatures. A compact Holguín government document showing the bureaucratic machinery of Chinese indenture in late colonial Cuba.

Item #23133

Price: $1,250.00