Michele Reid-Vazquez reveals the untold story of the strategies of negotiation used by free blacks in the aftermath of the "Year of the Lash"-a wave of repression in Cuba that had great implications for the Atlantic World in the next two decades.
At dawn on June 29, 1844, a firing squad in Havana executed ten accused ringleaders of the Conspiracy of La Escalera, an alleged plot to abolish slavery and colonial rule in Cuba. The condemned men represented prominent members of Cuba's free community of African descent, including the acclaimed poet Plácido (Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés). In an effort to foster a white majority and curtail black rebellion, Spanish colonial authorities also banished, imprisoned, and exiled hundreds of free blacks, dismantled the militia of color, and accelerated white immigration projects.
Scholars have debated the existence of the Conspiracy of La Escalera for over a century, yet little is known about how those targeted by the violence responded. Drawing on archival material from Cuba, Mexico, Spain, and the United States, Reid-Vazquez provides a critical window into understanding how free people of color challenged colonial policies of terror and pursued justice on their own terms using formal and extralegal methods. Whether rooted in Cuba or cast into the Atlantic World, free men and women of African descent stretched and broke colonial expectations of their codes of conduct locally and in exile. Their actions underscored how black agency, albeit fragmented, worked to destabilize repression's impact.
"Reid-Vazquez sheds new light on the plight and resilience of Afro-Cuban exiles, and on the Atlantic anxieties triggered by the forced exodus of free people of color. Well written and rich in descriptive detail, her book is a significant contribution to the literature on Cuba and the African Diaspora in the Caribbean in the nineteenth century."
Javier Villa-Flores, author of Dangerous Speech: A Social History of Blasphemy in Colonial
"Thoreau is among America's most revered and yet also despised writers; he's also among our most misread and misunderstood. Mercifully, the bicentennial of his birth seems to have summoned forth from writers and scholars books that can help us see Thoreau more clearly and anew, among them this perceptive book-length essay by Andrew Menard. Revisiting Walden and Walden, bringing to both an attentiv
Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Journal of Latin American Studies
"When Reid-Vasquez turns her attention to labor migration from Spain, Yucatán, and China to Cuba (topics that have received a fair amount of attention by other scholars), she casts them in a new light. . . . This rich picture renders La Escalera as plenty eventful, despite and beyond persistent questions of what happened in 1844."
