Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba
La Escalera and the Insurgencies of 1841-1844
Aisha K. Finch
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 05/2015
Pages: 316
Subject: History, Social Science
| University of North Carolina
eBook ISBN: 9781469622361
DESCRIPTION
While the discovery of La Escalera unleashed a reign of terror by the Spanish colonial powers in which hundreds of enslaved people were tortured, tried, and executed, Finch revises historiographical conceptions of the movement as a fiction conveniently invented by the Spanish government in order to target anticolonial activities. Connecting the political agitation stirred up by free people of color in the urban centers to the slave rebellions that rocked the countryside, Finch shows how the rural plantation was connected to a much larger conspiratorial world outside the agrarian sector. While acknowledging the role of foreign abolitionists and white creoles in the broader history of emancipation, Finch teases apart the organization, leadership, and effectiveness of the black insurgents in midcentury dissident mobilizations that emerged across western Cuba, presenting compelling evidence that black women played a particularly critical role.