SOURCE: Luis, William. “The Antislavery Narrative: Writing and the European Aesthetic.” In Literary Bondage: Slavery in Cuban Narrative, pp. 27-81. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.

[In the following essay, Luis describes how Cuban editors Domingo del Monte and José Antonio Saco encouraged the island's liberal writers to protest slavery.]

I

The antislavery narrative developed as part of a movement to abolish slavery and the slave trade.¹ Domingo del Monte gave rise to this form of protest by encouraging friends in his literary circle to write about slavery and the plight of the slave. These early works describe the abuses of the slavery system and the unjust and cruel punishment of the slave protagonist. By making blacks and slaves dominant elements of the emerging Cuban narrative, the antislavery works reflect a historical and literary counter-discourse which directly challenged the colonial and slavery systems.

Del Monte and the authors of the antislavery narrative were among the first to define Cuban culture, which, by its very nature, developed in opposition to the Spanish colonial discourse. Del Monte, who was born in Venezuela, was interested in promoting a Cuban type of education and culture on the island. With the Spanish writer J. Villarino, Del Monte founded and published the weekly La Moda o Recreo Semanal del Bello Sexo (1829 to 1831), a magazine about culture which included articles on fashion, music, and literature.² Del Monte gave publicity not only to Lord Byron, Goethe, and other European writers but to young native-born authors. As a member of the prestigious and powerful Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País, Del Monte was in charge of the education section, a position he held from 1830 to 1834. He was also named secretary and, in 1842, president of the Comisión de Literatura of the Sociedad Económica. With editor José Antonio Saco and others, Del Monte helped to make the Sociedad Económica's Revista Bimestre Cubana (1831 to 1834) one of the most important publications in the Spanish language. Del Monte was an active participant in the society and joined Cuban-born liberals in developing and defending a national culture.

Saco was the first to write about the emerging national culture. He used Arango y Parreño's distinction between madre patria, Spain, and patria, Havana, and applied them to the idea of nation, not to a region, like Havana, but to the entire island. Saco, who neither was from Havana nor had ties to the dominant sugar interest, was an exponent not of the Cuba grande, of sugar planters, but of the Cuba pequeña. According to the program of the intendente Alejandro Ramírez, supporters of the latter favored eliminating the slave trade, diversifying agriculture, and importing white workers.³ Saco defined Cuban nationality in the following manner: “That all people who live in the same land, have the same origin, the same language, the same usage and customs, those people have the same nationality … To negate Cuban nationality is to negate the sun's rays of the tropics in the afternoon.”⁴ Saco, in effect, had conceived of a Cuban nationality without independence. Although Saco added that Cuban nationality was only composed of the white race, Eduardo Torres-Cuevas and Arturo Sorhegui suggest that his idea of nationalism differed radically from that of slavers. According to them, Saco believed that there could be no nation with slavery. Saco wanted to eliminate slavery because it was an impediment to forging a Cuban nationality.⁵ For Del Monte and antislavery writers, the Cuban nationality also included blacks.

With intellectuals such as Saco and José de la Luz y Caballero, Del Monte promoted a spirit of “Cubanness” by transforming the Comisión de Literatura into the Academia Cubana de Literatura; literature became a weapon for expressing a national culture and changing society. Fernando VII's death in 1833 provided some optimism for Del Monte and his supporters. They successfully sought approval of the newly governing regent, María Cristina, and succeeded in making the Comisión an independent academy. However, Del Monte's efforts to promote a national culture met with resistance and touched upon existing tensions between sugar planters and liberal Cubans. Slavers and others hostile to Cuban-born nationals considered a Cuban academy to be subversive. Juan Bernardo O'Gavan, director of the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País, and Claudio Martínez de Pinillos, intendente and count of Villanueva, both proslavers, were the most outspoken opponents of the independent character of the newly formed academy. The powerful Sociedad Económica refused to recognize the academy, and Captain General Tacón suppressed it.⁶

In spite of the failure to create an Academia Cubana de Literatura, Del Monte pursued his literary and cultural interests. Del Monte was better known for his famous literary circle, which he began in his hometown of Matanzas in 1834, where young writers gathered and consulted his vast library and knowledge and looked to him for inspiration and guidance. To some extent, Del Monte continued the goals of the defunct academy with his tertulia. By 1835, Del Monte had moved his prestigious circle to Havana, where young and progressive authors continued to attend until he left the island in 1843. Del Monte indeed had an impact on the writers who gathered in his home and on their vision of a national literature. Many of the participants reached prominence in Cuban literature, including Cirilo Villaverde, Félix Tanco y Bosmeniel, Anselmo Suárez y Romero, José Zacarías González del Valle, Ramón de Palma, José Jacinto Milanés, Emilio Blanchet, and the ex-slave Juan Francisco Manzano. During their gatherings, Del Monte, a belated neoclassicist, encouraged his writer friends to abandon Romanticism and write a more realistic type of literature, which included portraying the evils of slavery. The group was not only literary and social in nature but political as well. For critic Mario Cabrera Saqui, the tertulia was of political importance: “The slavery question and its enormous consequence of injustice and horrendous crime was the preferred conversation in the Del Monte athenaeum. Inculcated in philanthropic and liberal ideas, Domingo del Monte and his select group of friends devoted themselves with enthusiasm to the dangerous task of combating the degrading and wretched secular institution. They advocated the total reform of customs as a means of obtaining a just social equilibrium.”⁷ Literature became a way of defining a national culture which included blacks and changing society.

The years surrounding the founding of Del Monte's literary circle coincided with a series of events, both in Cuba and Spain, which help to explain the reasons for the tertulia's existence. These events pertain, in part, to the tension on the island between the ruthless Captain General Tacón and liberal criollo intellectuals. Ramiro Guerra suggests that even influential Cuban patricians clashed with the Tacón government.

The objectives of sugar, coffee, and tobacco growers, cattle owners, and supporters of Spanish sovereignty were even incompatible with Tacón's dictatorial policies. Tacón set out to destroy these supporters of Spain with the same energy as he did “ambitious youths,” whom he considered to be enemies of Spain.⁸ Nonetheless, Tacón was an ally of large sugar planters. Del Monte, who was interested in promoting a Cuban national culture, opposed the Tacón government and its suppression of liberties on the island. In some respects, the Del Monte literary circle can be viewed both as a continuation of his interest in Cuban culture and as a challenge to and a defiance of the Tacón government, which represented the interests of slavers.

Del Monte's ideas regarding slavery are explained in his “Estado de la población blanca y de color de la isla de Cuba, en 1839.” If Del Monte looked to France and Great Britain for literary models, he also sought in their policies political direction. By the time Del Monte wrote his essay, France and Great Britain had ended slavery in their Caribbean colonies; for him slavery held back Cuba's progress into the modern era. Del Monte argued that slavery and slave masters were a thing of the past, characteristics of an uncivilized country. Furthermore, Cuba was violating the law. The slave trade was illegal and corruption permeated Cuban society. Here and elsewhere Del Monte accuses the captain general and governors of corruption and of receiving half an ounce of gold for every slave that entered the country.⁹ Del Monte proposed that Cuba could maintain its agricultural prominence without slaves and claimed that Cuba's success would be lost if the growing black population rebelled.¹⁰ The uncertainty of Cuba's future was a real concern for Del Monte and writers who would represent it as the figure of a child.

Del Monte's ideas form part of a counter-discourse on slavery which dates back to slave rebellions in Cuba, perhaps to the successful miners' rebellion from 1724 to 1800 and certainly to the uprising in Saint Domingue in 1791.¹¹ However, his text echos Félix Varela's “Memorias que demuestran la necesidad de extinguir la esclavitud de los negros en la Isla de Cuba, atendiendo a los intereses de sus propietarios, por el Presbítero don Félix Varela, Diputado a Cortes.” Varela, in his capacity as an elected representative from 1822 to 1823, was the first native-born creole to propose an end to slavery in Cuba.¹² Varela, like Del Monte, Saco, and others who participated in a counter-discourse to slavery, was responding to Arango y Parreño's Discurso sobre la agricultura de la Habana y medios de fomentarla (1792), which proposed a plan to expand sugar production in Havana. Arango was the representative of the town council of Havana to the courts and spokesman for the sugarocracy, and he effectively lobbied for agricultural prominence. Three years before, in his Primer papel sobre el comercio de negros (1789), he had requested and the courts had granted the free importation of slaves to Cuba, starting a new stage of slavery and the slave trade. The royal decree of February 28, 1789, opened Cuba (but also Puerto Rico and the province of Caracas) for a period of two years to the slave trade. The decree did away with special permissions and contracts and allowed any resident of Spain or the Indies to engage in the free traffic in slaves. Arango was able to further his cause when the rebellion in Saint Domingue erupted. While negotiating the extension of the slave trade, Arango utilized the rebellion as a means of justifying the benefits to agriculture. His Oficio acompañando copia de la representación sobre la introducción de negros y corroborándola con razones muy sólidas led to the royal decree of 1791, which stated that in 1792 the free slave trade would be extended for another six years. In reality it would last until 1820.¹³

Speaking to the same audience Arango did, Varela wanted to show a different reality. He addressed the same concern for agriculture but, unlike Arango, concluded that Cuba's agricultural prominence could be ruined by the increasing number of blacks on the island. Varela believed that blacks did not accept their inferiority and resented being treated as incompetent. Moreover, they could rebel and obtain their “liberty and right to be happy.” For this, blacks in Cuba could receive help from independent countries, in particular Haiti. A black rebellion would not only ruin agriculture, but Spain could lose the island. Valera believed that he was proposing what people in Cuba wanted; that is, an end to slavery, an idea counterposed to the interest of powerful slavers.¹⁴

Varela was a professor at the Colegio-Seminario de San Carlos, which, under the direction of Bishop Díaz de Espada, became a center of change from scholasticism to rationalism. Varela supported the Constitution of Cádiz of 1812, which was based on the “natural rights of man” and the “social contract.” Its triumph in 1820 produced in Spain a shift from the slave to the commercial bourgeoisie, from loyalists of Fernando VII to supporters of liberal ideas. Although the shift was not reproduced to the same degree in Cuba, creole and Spanish intellectuals began to express their dissatisfaction and found encouragement in the political situation in the peninsula.¹⁵

Del Monte's ideas are more directly influenced by Saco's “Análisis por don José Antonio Saco de una obra sobre el Brazil, intitulada, Notices of Brazil in 1828 and 1829, by Rev. R. Walsh, Author of a Journey from Constantinople, etc.” [1832] and, in particular, his elaboration in “Mi primera pregunta. La abolición del comercio de esclavos africanos arruinará o atrasará la agricultura cubana? Dedícala a los hacendados de la isla de Cuba su compatriota José Antonio Saco” (1837).¹⁶ Del Monte admired Saco's patriotic valor for proposing that, in a society governed by the slave trade, the increased number of blacks caused a danger to whites. Although Saco's and Del Monte's ideas were antithetical to the antislavery cause, they were aware of the discourse of power and chose to challenge it not by going outside of the rhetoric of slavers but by appropriating their ideas and showing the fallacy of the sugar discourse. Like Varela, Saco and Del Monte employed the same strategy used by those who supported slavery and the slave trade to reveal a different truth. They were not revolutionaries by today's standards but, in the period in which they lived, they were at the vanguard of a counter-discourse on slavery. Any questioning of the hegemonic discourse was interpreted as a threat to the slaver's power. In effect, Saco and Del Monte were important agents in breaking the monopoly of a sugar discourse and attempting to create a dialogue on slavery.

In “Mi primera pregunta,” Saco was aware that anyone who opposed the slave trade was considered an abolitionist of Cuban slavery, even though the slave trade was prohibited by law and the “enlightenment of the century resisted it.” Saco argued two points: (1) Cuban agriculture could survive without the slave trade and (2) a continued slave trade would endanger the lives of whites on the island. Saco relied on his broad knowledge of history to demonstrate that whites are just as capable as blacks of working in labor-intensive jobs, including sugarcane fields and mills; he also disputed the accepted notion for keeping only slaves on plantations. In place of the slave, Saco proposed importing free wage laborers, who he believed would be advantageous for growers. White workers would do away with inefficient, sick, and runaway slaves and costly uprisings. Saco supported smaller sugar mills, pointing out that in 1838 there were many more mills run by smaller groups of slaves. He argued that big mills did not necessarily produce more sugar and the smaller ones could diversify their agricultural production. Such propositions addressed the continuing conflict between large sugar planters and small agriculturists.

Saco's text confronts the concerns of the dominant discourse. In what appears to be an attempt to gain support among slavers and drive a wedge between large and small planters,¹⁷ Saco reassures readers that his position is not to emancipate slaves but to end the slave trade. He disarms the central issue that sugar production will decline if the slave trade is eliminated. Saco's impressive research shows that after the slave trade ended in British and French Caribbean islands, sugar production increased with the same slave population, which also had increased.

After appealing to the reason of his readers, in the second part of his essay Saco continued to cite statistics but also incorporated an emotional component. He argued, like Del Monte would, that the increase in slave population in Cuba would put at risk everything whites owned, including their lives and the country. Saco cites rebellions in Saint Domingue and Jamaica, the latter having five major uprisings in the early part of the nineteenth century, the last one in 1832 in which two hundred whites and five hundred blacks died. Winning battles did not reveal the entire picture. Any battle which whites won would still mean the destruction of the island and pointed to a conspiracy among the growing free black population of the British islands which could threaten slave countries, including the southern United States.

Like Del Monte, Saco considered Cuba backward in comparison to most enlightened nations such as France, Great Britain, Denmark, Holland, and the United States, all of which had growing abolitionist movements that sought emancipation of slaves. Saco believed that it was in Spain's interest to preserve Cuba for its favorable trade with the island and for its geographic position, controlling access to other countries in the Americas. However, Cuba's geographic position also made the island vulnerable to foreign power struggles which would find help among the black population.

Saco ends his counter-discourse by appropriating the law into his essay and referring to Spain's treaty with Great Britain to end the slave trade in 1820. The illegal slave trade leaves open the possibility, sooner or later, of some retaliation by the British government. Saco reassures his readers that he is on their side and is defending their interests. Although Saco does not argue for the emancipation of slaves in Cuba, this proposition is clearly implicit in his essay. Importing white workers meant stopping the slave trade. For slavers, ending the slave trade was as threatening as ending slavery. But Saco also supported a black free labor force, thus further suggesting an emancipation of sorts.

By the time Del Monte established his literary circle, Saco was a known enemy of the captain general and slave traders. Arango, who by this time had abandoned his proslavery position, saved Saco from exile for proposing the elimination of the slave traffic when reviewing, in the Revista Bimestre Cubana, Walsh's article on Brazil. However, two years later, in 1834, Tacón exiled Saco to Trinidad (in Cuba) and later forced him to leave the island for his defense of the Academia Cubana and his attacks on O'Gavan, published in the pamphlet Justa defensa de la Academia Cubana de Literatura contra los violentos ataques que se le han dado en el Diario de la Habana desde el 12 hasta el 23 de abril del presente año, escrita por don José Antonio Saco y publicada por un amigo de la Academia. In reality, Saco was expelled by Spaniards and sugarocrats. O'Gavan and Martínez de Pinillos were instrumental in denouncing Saco. Tacón, who had subsequently dissolved the academy, also closed the important Revista Bimestre Cubana.

Saco believed that he was being punished not so much for defending the academy but for attacking the slave trade two years before. In his autobiography he writes: “The article to which I allude, in spite of it having been published with the expressed approval of the first authority of the island, was the fundamental cause of my expatriation in 1834; and if this one was not verified since 1832, it was due to the utmost respect of the distinguished don Francisco Arango who, manifesting my honorable intentions to General Ricafort, who then governed Cuba, undid the plot formed against me by many Cubans and Europeans of great importance.”¹⁸ For Del Monte, literature and culture became a more effective means of combating slavery and the slave trade. Saco, Luz y Caballero, Nicolás Manuel Escobedo, and Del Monte were recognized as the most influential figures among young intellectuals.

The year 1835 appears to be pivotal for an overall understanding of politics and literature in Cuba. It was the year in which Del Monte moved his literary circle to Havana, and another confrontation between Tacón and liberal criollos took place in the May election of deputies for the Estamento de Procuradores. In spite of Tacón's opposition, and with the support of Gen. Manuel Lorenzo, governor of the province of Oriente, Luz y Caballero, Saco (in absentia), Andrés de Arango, and Juan Montalvo were elected deputies. The election was interpreted as a victory for Saco and Luz y Caballero and a defeat for Tacón. However, political changes in Spain did not allow the new deputies to assume their responsibilities. Istúriz, who took power in Spain on May 15, dissolved the courts and convoked new elections. At the end of the second election period, Montalvo, Saco, and Arango again triumphed, but they were prevented from carrying out their representation a second time by an uprising of sergeants in August who demanded a reinstatement of the Constitution of 1812.¹⁹

Reinstating the constitution in Spain had other ramifications in Cuba. In spite of opposition from the Tacón administration, many liberals were encouraged by the creation of a constitutional monarchy. During the Guerra Carlista (1834 to 1838), Lorenzo was a staunch supporter of María Cristina, the young Isabel, and constitutional Spain, and as governor of Oriente he made efforts to implement the constitution on the island. Tacón opposed the constitution and took measures to suppress it. He marched against Lorenzo, forcing him to leave Cuba in December 1836.²⁰ The victory gave Tacón more strength to continue his oppressive rule over the colony. However, in spite of Tacón's success or because of it, opposition to his government continued.

Del Monte and other liberal Cubans received encouragement to promote their ideas not only from the constitution and Lorenzo's actions but also from British activities in Cuba and Spain. The same year Del Monte transferred his literary circle to Havana, the British on June 28, 1835, strengthened their 1817 treaty with Spain, pressuring the more conciliatory Cristina government to end the slave trade. One year before, in 1834, the British had abolished slavery in their Caribbean possessions. As a result, British commerce became more costly than that of the Spanish colonies. For economic, moral, and religious reasons,²¹ British abolitionists pressed for an end to slavery and the slave trade in Cuba and other Spanish colonies. Provisions had been made for ending the slave trade. The 1817 treaty established a Mixed Commission to judge ships and crews caught trafficking in slaves.²² In return, the British government paid Fernando VII 400,000 pounds sterling to terminate the slave traffic. But the agreement did little to curtail the slave trade.²³ The much stronger 1835 treaty allowed both Spanish and British navies on the open sea to search ships suspected of trafficking in slaves. Unlike the 1817 treaty, that of 1835 did not require the presence of slaves on board but allowed the use of other evidence to find slavers guilty. Slave ships caught in the slave traffic were dismantled and sold in pieces and their slave cargo was set free. In spite of the power and vigilance of the British navy, the profitable slave trade persisted and the most recognized Spanish slaver, Pedro Blanco, continued sending slaves to Cuba until he retired a few years before he died in 1854. The 1835 treaty made provisions for the creation of a mixed Anglo-Spanish tribunal to be established in Havana.²⁴ The British government also obtained permission to dock one of its ships, the Rodney, in Havana Bay. The Spanish authorities viewed the Rodney as a threat and its black crew a provocation.

One year after Britain strengthened its treaty with Spain, Richard Madden arrived in Cuba. Madden, an abolitionist and arbiter in Mixed Court, played an important role in supporting Del Monte's antislavery activities and publicizing the antislavery cause in Europe and the Americas. In his Memoirs, Thomas More Madden described the reasons for his father's trip to Havana:

At that time, this magnificently situated city was not only the flourishing capital of the finest of all the Spanish colonies, but was also the chief commercial center of the West Indian slave-trade, the extinction of which was the object of Dr. Madden's mission. Here, for upwards of three years, he continued to devote all the energies of his character to the battle of right against might, in the vindication of the cause of humanity and liberty which it was his privilege to maintain almost single-handed with the Cuban slave traders, then supported by the Spanish authorities. At the time of Dr. Madden's arrival in the Havana [sic], the predominant evil influence of the slave-trade was painfully evinced not only in the miserable condition of the oppressed negro race, but also in the demoralization of their masters, and the irreparable evils thereby effected in the social life as well as in the political affairs of that fair, but ill-governed island.²⁵

Richard Madden was superintendent of Liberated Africans and judge of the Mixed Court until 1840. He was a known enemy of slavers and a friend of the Del Monte group.

By 1835, the slave Manzano was a visitor of the Del Monte literary circle and celebrated by its members for reading his autobiographical poem “Treinta años.” Manzano, while still a slave and with the help of Del Monte, published his Poesías líricas in 1821 and Flores pasageras [sic] in 1830. The dates of these publications suggest that Del Monte's attitude toward slavery and national culture had been formed before founding La Moda o Recreo Semanal del Bello Sexo and indeed before he became one of the editors of the Revista Bimestre Cubana. In 1835, Del Monte requested that Manzano write his autobiography and, in that same year, collected money to purchase his freedom. Del Monte also commissioned antislavery narratives of Tanco y Bosmeniel and Suárez y Romero.²⁶ Adriana Lewis Galanes has determined that Del Monte gave Madden for his antislavery portfolio the following items:

1. Manzano's Apuntes autobiográficos.
2. Thirteen poems contained in “Poesías de J. F. Manzano, esclavo en la isla de Cuba.”
3. Suárez y Romero's El ingenio o las delicias del campo.
4. Del Monte's glossary to explain Cuban words contained in Francisco under the title “Definición de voces cubanas.”
5. Tanco's “El hombre misterioso,” which he later entitled “El cura,” considered to be the second of three included in his Escenas de la vida privada en la isla de Cuba.
6. Pedro José Morilla's “El ranchador.” Lewis Galanes considers this short story to be an earlier version of the one Morilla published in La Piragua in 1856.
7. “Cartas,” written by one or more authors. Lewis Galanes suspects they belong to Suárez y Romero.
8. A group of prose and verse compositions, one of them belonging to José Zacarías González del Valle, and a short narration, “Un niño en la Habana.”
9. Interviews entitled “Interrogatorio de Mr. R. R. Madden, Absuelto el 17 de septiembre de 1839, por Domingo del Monte.”
10. Interviews entitled “Interrogatorio de 120 preguntas que sobre el estado eclesiástico de la Isla de Cuba me ha hecho Mr. R. Madden, Juez de la Comisión Mixta por Inglaterra. Noviembre 1838, por Domingo del Monte.”
11. Rafael Matamorros y Téllez's five long compositions entitled “Elejías cubanas.”²⁷

Of the antislavery information given to him by Del Monte, Madden translated and published Manzano's autobiography, poems, and interviews with Del Monte, along with two of his own poems, under the title Poems of a Slave in the Island of Cuba (1840) in England.

Del Monte was aware of the different discourses of the time. Just as Del Monte employed one type of discourse with slavers in his “Estado de la población blanca y de color de la isla de Cuba, en 1839,” he used a different one when discussing slavery with British officials. Del Monte's other position is clear in his interviews with Madden which the judge translated and included in Poems by a Slave in the Island of Cuba. Del Monte's answers coincided to some extent with the judge's abolitionist position to document violations in the Cuban slave trade. Whereas Del Monte's and Saco's essays pertained to the survival of agriculture in Cuba without slavery and pointed to the fear of a possible slave uprising, Del Monte's interview, like his essay, implicated Tacón in the slave trade. It also made reference to the enslavement of emancipated blacks and requested British intervention to remove them from the island. Del Monte shaped his discourse to reach another audience. If Saco in his “Mi primera pregunta” proposed that terminating the slave trade would not produce a significant change in Cuban slavery, Del Monte, who used in his essay Saco's statistics, provided a different response when Madden asked the same crucial question: “If the slave-trade were stopped, in how many years would the slave-population be extinct, provided the system of management remained unaltered?” Del Monte answered: “In twenty years, or thereabouts; but the ordinary mortality is calculated at 5 per cent., although it is certain that on the sugar plantations the mortality is much greater; while in the towns, on coffee properties, and other farms, the deaths are much less.”²⁸ Saco too employed a different discourse with abolitionists like Madden. In a letter he wrote to Del Monte regarding a reading of Suárez y Romero's Francisco, Madden makes reference to Saco's intentions: “How in God's name could Saco say that slavery was a bland servitude in Cuba!” “Why should a man like Saco say any thing he did not think for the sake of disarming the hostility of the planters to his enlightened views.”²⁹ Madden's correspondence with Del Monte and perhaps with Saco as well points to a certain complicity between the judge and them. For example, upon his departure, Madden wrote to Del Monte: “Whether we meet again or not—we must not cease to be friends—claiming kindred with your tastes—and a relationship though in a very far degree with our talents I look upon myself as one of your literary cousin germains but ‘something more than kith though less than kin’ with your opinions and principles in all their bearings on ‘the iniquity of iniquities’ the slave trade.”³⁰ For Madden, Saco, and Del Monte, an end of the slave trade was tantamount to an end of slavery.

Both Madden and Del Monte agreed that their antislavery cause could be better achieved through literature for its “humanizing” effect. Like Del Monte, Madden had a strong interest in literature and recognized its importance in altering the existing evils of society; namely, slavery and the slave trade. In his capacity as judge, Madden was obligated to respect laws sanctioned by the colonial government but did find refuge in a higher religious order. In a letter to Del Monte dated July 2, 1838, he wrote: “He that shall steal a Man and sell him being convicted of the guilt shall be put to death.!!!” In the same letter, Madden looked to literature for expressing his ideas: “And I have only to repeat that I love Literature too well to be indifferent to its success in any country and that its successful cultivation here so much the result of the dedication of your own valuable talents to its pursuit is in my opinion worthy of the highest praise—and to you and those like you—permit me to say in all sincerity Go on and prosper!”³¹ In the same letter, Madden conveyed to Del Monte his successful efforts to establish in Jamaica, some years before the end of slavery, a literary institution.

Like Madden, Del Monte believed that literature should reflect reality and, in the interest of promoting “Cubanness,” the incipient narrative had to describe life on the island. By depicting aspects of Cuban life, Del Monte in effect was asking his author friends to combine literature and slavery or, in a contemporary language, literature and politics. Del Monte felt that a realistic narration should explore the theme of slavery. In an 1832 study of the historical novel, published in the Revista Bimestre Cubana, Del Monte proposed that a successful writer must possess three qualities: he must be a poet, a philosopher, and an antiquarian.³² For Del Monte, the change in literary focus from romanticism to realism represented a possible means of altering the Cuban slave society; that is, to bring an end to slavery and the slave trade. …

Notes

1. Rebecca Scott proposes different explanations for ending slavery: (1) domestic and international pressures; (2) contradiction between slave labor and the introduction of technology; (3) a shift to free labor with the support of enlightened planters. See Slave Emancipation in Cuba, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985) 4-5.

2. Due to literary and administrative differences with Villarino, Del Monte left the magazine in 1830. After Del Monte's departure, the quality of the magazine diminished until it finally closed in 1831. See Diccionario de la literatura Cubana, vol. 2 (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1984), 625-626.

3. Eduardo Torres-Cuevas and Arturo Sorhegui, eds., José Antonio Saco: Acerca de la esclavitud y su historia (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1982), 25. Antonio Benítez Rojo explores the slavery discourse by dividing the Cuban question into Cuba grande and Cuba pequeña. For him, the first represents the interest of sugarocrats and a vision toward foreign markets, the second that of creoles and an inward vision to the land, folklore, and tradition. Benítez Rojo situates the “discourse of resistance,” beginning with El Mensajero Semanal, published by José Antonio Saco and Félix Varela, between 1828 and 1831. However, I feel that Varela's ideas were already present in his “Memorias que demuestra la necesidad de extinguir la esclavitud de los negros en la Isla de Cuba, atendiendo a los intereses de sus propietarios, por el Presbítero don Félix Varela, Diputado a Cortes,” which is anterior to Saco and Varela's publication. Since El Mensajero Semanal was a New York publication, I agree with Benítez Rojo's subsequent attempt to establish the dialogue in a local publication in 1832 with the liberal takeover of the Revista Bimestre Cubana, which belonged to the Comisión de Literatura of the Sociedad Patriótica. See his “Azúcar/Poder/Texto,” 93-117.

4. José Antonio Saco, Colección de papeles científicos, históricos, políticos y de otros ramos sobre la isla de Cuba (Havana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba, 1963), vol. 3, 442-443. Also cited in Torres-Cuevas and Sorhegui, eds., José Antonio Saco, 51. My translation.

5. Torres-Cuevas and Sorhegui, eds., José Antonio Saco, 59, 62.

6. Salvador Bueno, Figuras cubanas del siglo diecinueve (Havana: UNEAC, 1980), 212; and La crítica, 50. Also see Guerra, Manual de historia, 340-341 and Francisco Calcagno, Diccionario biográfico cubano (New York: N. Ponce de León, 1878), 232-237.

7. See Mario Cabrera Saqui, “Vida, pasión y gloria de Anselmo Suárez y Romero,” in Francisco (Havana: Biblioteca Básica de Autores Cubanos, 1970), 211-212. This essay appeared as the prologue to the 1947 edition of the novel. My translation. Also see “La tertulia literaria de del Monte,” Revista de la Facultad de Letras y Ciencias 14, no. 1: 50. Cited in Juan J. Remos, Historia de la literatura Cubana (Havana: Cárdenas y Compañía, 1945), vol. 1, 279-280; Bueno, Figuras cubanas, 212; and Bueno, La crítica, 35.

8. Guerra, Manual de historia, 342-343.

9. In his political letters, Del Monte accuses Tacón of being a despot. See, for example, his letter “Al Redactor de El Correo Nacional de Madrid,” dated June 30, 1838, in his Escritos, vol. 1, ed. José A. Fernández de Castro (Havana: Cultural, 1929), 103-109.

10. Del Monte, “Estado de la población blanca y de color de la Isla de Cuba, en 1839,” in Escritos, 144-159.

11. See José Luciano Franco, Las minas.

12. During the fight for colonial independence, Deputy Miguel Guridi y Alcócer was the first to propose an end to slavery. While the new constitution was being debated in the March 26, 1811, session, he proposed the following: An end to the slave trade, salaries for slaves, absolute right for slaves to buy their freedom, and better treatment for those who remained in servitude. One month later, for moral and religious reasons, the liberal deputy Agustín Arguelles offered a less radical approach, limiting himself to the elimination of the slave trade. He believed that once the slave trade ended, masters would treat their slaves better. He also recognized opposition from interest parties. Both Guridi's and Arguelles's propositions were sent for further study to a committee, from which they never emerged. The debates inscribed in the Diario de las Cortes were answered by Arango y Parreño, who argued that slavery “pertains to our lives, to all of our future, and that of our descendants.” See Levi Marrero, Cuba, vol. 9, 28-33, my translation.

13. Ibid., 19, 23-25.

14. See Varela's “Memorias” in Documentos para la historia de Cuba, ed. Hortensia Pichardo (Havana: Instituto del Libro, 1971), vol. 1, 269-275.

15. Torres-Cuevas and Sorhegui, eds., José Antonio Saco, 23.

16. See Saco's “Análisis por don José Antonio Saco de una obra sobre el Brazil, intitulada, Notices of Brazil in 1828 and 1829, by Rev. R. Walsh, Author of a Journey from Constantinople, etc.,” in Colección, vol. 2, 30-90. In particular, see a reworking of “Mi primera pregunta” in “La supresión del tráfico de esclavos africanos en la isla de Cuba, examinada con relación a su agricultura y a su seguridad, por don José Antonio Saco,” in ibid., 90-154.

17. Torres-Cuevas and Sorhegui, eds., José Antonio Saco, 44.

18. Saco, Colección, vol. 2, 161-162. Also cited in Torres-Cuevas and Sorhegui, eds., José Antonio Saco, 39, my translation.

19. Guerra, Manual de historia, 380-383.

20. Ibid., 384-391.

21. Although there were economic reasons for ending the slave trade, there were also important moral and religious ones. For example, in the United States the Quakers played an important part in having the Continental Congress declare itself against the slave trade. In Britain, William Wilberforce, an evangelist, for twenty years led the campaign in Parliament to abolish slavery. See Marrero, Cuba, 26.

22. Guerra summarizes the treaty between England and Spain as follows: (1) Immediate suppression of the slave traffic north of the equator. (2) Its end south of the equator after April 22, 1821. (3) Great Britain would compensate owners whose ships were captured by British cruisers. For this, a Mixed Commission would be appointed to determine the amount of the compensation. (4) Within a specified period, British cruisers would not be able to capture or detain Spanish ships which transported slaves south of the equator. (5) The king would dictate the necessary orders to increase the white population of Cuba. (6) If the issues were not resolved, the slave trade would continue (Manual de historia, 256).

23. See Leslie B. Rout, The African Experience in Spanish America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 289-290.

24. Guerra, Manual de historia, 408. In a letter to Manuel Sanguily dated April 1886, Francisco Jimeno explains the composition of the Mixed Commission in which the British consul in Havana, Mr. Tolme, a businessman living on the island and owner of farms and slaves, was replaced by Mr. David Turnbull, known for his abolitionist ideas. Turnbull was the nightmare of the captain generals interested in contraband slaves. (Biblioteca Nacional José Martí, Clasificación: C. M., Morales, 22, no. 10). Cited in Roberto Friol, Suite para Juan Francisco Manzano (Havana: Editorial Arte y Literatura, 1977), 31, note 5.

25. See Richard Robert Madden, The Memoirs (Chiefly Autobiographical) from 1798 to 1886 of Richard Robert Madden, ed. Thomas More Madden (London: Ward and Downey, 1891), 76. Cited in Edward J. Mullen, ed., The Life and Poems (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1981), 7.

26. Suárez y Romero started writing his narrative in Puentes Grandes and concluded in the Surinam sugar mill. Del Monte's request is made explicit in a letter to the patrician. See Centón epistolario de Domingo del Monte (Havana: Imprenta “El Siglo XX,” 1930), vol. 4, 38-39.

27. Adriana Lewis Galanes, “El Album de Domingo del Monte (Cuba, 1838/39),” 263-265.

28. See The Life and Poems, 130-131. The interview in Spanish is reproduced in Del Monte, Escritos, 133-143.

29. Del Monte, Centón epistolario, vol. 4, 83, my emphasis.

30. Ibid., 86.

31. Ibid., vol. 3, 168-169.

32. Esteban Rodríguez Herrera, “Estudio crítico a Cecilia Valdés,” in Acerca de Cirilo Villaverde (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1982), 176-177.