| Summary: | During the first half of the XIXth century, the big landlords of Cuba began to consider that it was in their interest to treat their slaves better, as the rare commodity had become expensive. Without the slightest consideration for their victims, the slave-owners imagined a policy known as the “good treatment”, according to the formula of the period, to facilitate the procreation of the slaves and increase their life expectancy and thus “usefulness”. The slave-owners decided to better feed their slaves, to accommodate them better, to look after them better, all this in order to make them work better. Far from signifying the definitive crisis of the slave system, the “good treatment” represented on the contrary, for the slave-owners, the cynical way to establish the servile institution ad vitam aeternam. Even if the “good treatment” underpinned a reformist posture, however paradoxical it can appear, this policy was not determined by a reformist attitude in itself but by the reaction of the hacendados in front of a certain threat.
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