Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba: La Escalera and the Insurgencies of 1841-1844

Envisioning Cuba

by Aisha K. Finch

Envisioning La Escalera--an underground rebel movement largely composed of Africans living on farms and plantations in rural western Cuba--in the larger context of the long emancipation struggle in Cuba, Aisha Finch demonstrates how organized slave resistance became critical to the unraveling not only of slavery but also of colonial systems of power during the nineteenth century.

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.

Genres: History

316 pages, Paperback

First published April 10, 2015

Reviews

[Sasha (bahareads) · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book's thesis is the rural slaves of African descent helped to organize and lead one of Cuba's most memorable resistance struggles. The movement of 1844 cannot be understood apart from the revolts of 1843 or separated from the political architecture of West and Central Africa. In the broadest sense she seeks to understand what happened in rural Black communities during the years leading up to 1844 repression She traces the outlines of Black political culture in rural plantation work that produced insurgent struggle and transcended its limitations.

Finch is countering previous ideas that the Spanish colonial government made up the Black rebel movement to persecute and dismantle the upwardly mobile free people of colour in the particular region. Few scholars have developed into the landscape of Black political life in Western Cuba after 1844 and before 1868. Recent historical debates have shifted to highlight links between 1844 and international debates over the slave trade and colonial rule. Few scholars have examined the centrality of Black historical actors in the project of nation-making in Cuba.

Finch places women at the center of the narrative opening up new theoretical possibilities for the entity known as slave rebellion. She uses a pedagogy of state terror and believes the lives of the enslaved (political subjectivities, social and community formations, and gendered identities) offer important ways to understand the making of this and other slave movements.

The IMPORTANCE of this book lies in its contention that a group of slave dissidents shaped Cuba's largest anticolonial endeavours before the opening of independence in 1868. Finch seeks to excavate a longer narrative for the Black political struggle that has been obscured by the state. She wants to muddy categories of slave struggle by showing slave women in a different light, and she wants scholars to think more expansively about how slave insurgencies and other liberation struggles are brought to life.

Finch's archival approach was interesting. The reading practice employed questions an approach to the archive first and last as a diagnostic of colonial pathos, fear, and fantasy It is suggested that the attempt to acknowledge the violence of the archive can sometimes produce other kinds of violence in the way we remember our histories. She weaves a path through the archive's epistemological violence by reading state documents as an index of colonial power and self-fashioning & texts with multiple authors. Most importantly she considers the silences as texts with gendered implications.

The significance of this book is Finch moves rural Black people's stories to the forefront by exploring visions of resistance that developed in rural Cuba 1841-44. She calls attention to the majority organizing collectives and individuals in the movement: slave women and non-elite men.
It contains two strands of knowledge: the lengths the colonial state would go to contain its threats and endless possibilities for black degradation under slavery.

The (my fav) methodology Finch uses in her book is her expanding upon Stephanie Camp's idea of rival geographies. "Use of plantation space was highly contested and planters sought to exert spatial and temporal control over black bodies, yet these bodies pushed back creating rival geographies." + "Mapping out public and liminal spaces where enslaved reclaimed their bodies, time, and relationships will enable us to understand how Black Cubans created their own rival geographies."

A lot to be said but this book is fantastic.

[Jay Sandlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loved the addition of the women's voices and the trial testimony that brought to light the rural contributions of participants.

[Mike Emett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Required reading for a graduate seminar, Comparative Slavery