Present but Unseen

This chapter discusses how Juan Francisco Manzano created two apparently contradictory freedom narratives: the first grounded in Enlightenment ideals of liberty and the second one premised on the secret powers of African-inspired ritual.By privileging Manzano’s slave narrative and his unpublished poetry, this chapter deciphers the way he wrote about spirit presence, the sacred wilderness and the ritual of escape.Poems such as “A Dream: For My Second Brother,” “The Poet’s Vision Composed on a Sugar Plantation,” “Poesies,” and “Desperation” explore African ideas of spirit and cosmos as part of a larger antislavery philosophy.The dream motif, the mountain wilderness, transfiguration, anachronism and magical flight emerges as Romantic tropes that created space for an African-Cuban religious persona in Manzano’s poetry and prose.In this way, the notion that Manzano assimilated to Spanish Catholicism unproblematically is contested and disproven.

The Introduction

The introduction presents Manzano and Plácido to readers as Cuban authors of African descent that navigated conflicting bodies of religious knowledge and disparate aesthetic practices.This chapter defines key terms both critical and theoretical. And, briefly takes a look at how Plácido and Manzano have been studied as assimilationists in the formation of the Cuban literary tradition.The introduction provides a very brief review of scholarly approaches to Plácido and Manzano but suggests a radical departure from most previous scholarship on the authors.This chapter introduces African-inspired spirituality as a lens for articulating antislavery philosophy in black Cuban poetry and prose.This book explores new terrain because it explores what the relationship between aesthetics, religion, and black aspirations for emancipation might teach us about the origins of Cuban literature.

Epilogue

On June 20, 1844, Spanish authorities executed Plácido in Matanzas before a firing squad. The military tribunal ordered that Plácido be shot in the back as the chief architect, recruiter, and instigator of “the conspiracy devised by the people of color in this city, for the extermination of the white population of the island.”...

Black Cuban Literati in the Age of Revolution

This chapter discusses Plácido and Manzano’s involvement in the 1844 antislavery movement and it refutes the notion that Manzano was an apolitical author.With few exceptions, critics have claimed that Manzano was bereft of a political project and argued that Plácido’s liberal discourse had no relationship to his racial politics.The final chapter disproves both of these theses.It analyzes the government narrative of black conspiracy and white victimhood side by side with a close reading of Plácido and Manzano’s letters and depositions.Government accounts of uprising legitimize power by deliberately creating silences, speaking in code, and otherwise dissembling the truth.Thus, this chapter deconstructs the official government narrative and Manzano and Plácido’s joint interrogation.It highlights the way that Manzano and Plácido developed different strategies to distance themselves from the 1844 antislavery movement, the notion of anti-white conspiracy, and even from each other.

Carnival, the Virgin, and the Saints

This chapter demonstrates how Plácido appealed to African ideas of spirit and cosmos to create a blueprint for black Cuban liberation.This chapter brings two narratives into contention to explore the political function of African-inspired spirituality in Plácido’s poetry: the poems about African-inspired spirituality and the government’s account about his conspiratorial activities to depose the colonial regime.This chapter makes the African epistemological claims in Plácido’s poetry legible while also examining the government indictment of the poet for the “horrendous crime” of “conspiracy against the white race.”This chapter constitutes the first serious examination of Plácido’s poetry alluding to African-inspired spirituality.Poems such as “To the Mountain Pan,” “The Silhouette of a Soul,” “Ghosts, Witches and Spirits,” “The Oath,” “To the Virgin of the Rosary,” “Me Don’t Know What I Said,” and “The Little Devil” acknowledge the inherent power of sacred oaths, carnival and the African orishasto transform the outcome of events in the materials world.

Myth of the Christian Poet

This chapter explores how Plácido’s poems on race differed from that of Manzano, his enslaved counterpart.Plácido, whose mulatto racial identity was never in doubt, saw little need to create such an image for public consumption.Rather, his satirical poems mocked the mulatto desire to become white through the denial of African ancestry.This chapter examines Plácido’s Catholic poetry alongside his racial satire to demonstrate that the contradiction inherent in his literary work.The analysis of Plácido’s religious poetry in tandem with his satire exposes the apparent contradictions that arose from the articulation of a racial politics in defiance of whiteness on the one hand and the adulation of Catholicism on the other.Poems such as “Death of the Redeemer,” “The Birth of Christ,” “For the Death of Christ,” “The Resurrection,” and two relatively unknown poems, “My Imprisonment” and “To Lince, from Prison” are historical evidence of how Plácido negotiated good social standing with local ecclesiastical elites.

Católico a mi manera

This chapter discusses Manzano’s early identity formation from a religious and racial standpoint prior to his 1836 manumission.Instead of reading Manzano’s Catholicism as imperfect mimicry–as Homi Bhabha might suggest–this chapter explores the mulatto-Catholic identity as a persona that garnered social capital and as a political statement that rendered Manzano inoffensive when questioned by the Military Commission under suspicion of conspiracy.The racial self-image that Manzano created in his slave narrative, poetry, and letters to his patron Domingo Del Monte manifest double-consciousness because the poet reads himself through the prism of the white gaze.But unlike in previous studies, Pettway demonstrates that Manzano’s Autobiografíaand poetry demonstrate that the Catholic redemption narrative was insufficient to emancipate the enslaved person.