Freedom from Liberation

Slavery, Sentiment, and Literature in Cuba

Gerard Aching

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780253016935
• eBook ISBN: 9780253017055
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Latinoamérica y el Caribe

"Delves into the life and work of Juan Francisco Manzano, the enslaved Cuban poet and author of Spanish America's only known slave narrative . . . Valuable." — Choice
By exploring the complexities of enslavement in the autobiography of Cuban slave-poet Juan Francisco Manzano (1797–1854), Gerard Aching complicates the universally recognized assumption that a slave's foremost desire is to be freed from bondage. As the only slave narrative in Spanish that has surfaced to date, Manzano's autobiography details the daily grind of the vast majority of slaves who sought relief from the burden of living under slavery. Aching combines historical narrative and literary criticism to take the reader beyond Manzano's text to examine the motivations behind anticolonial and antislavery activism in pre-revolution Cuba, when Cuba's Creole bourgeoisie sought their own form of freedom from the colonial arm of Spain.

ONE

Liberalisms at Odds

Slavery and the Struggle for an
Autochthonous Literature

In a letter that they wrote from New York on September 12, 1834, to the Creole patrician and liberal reformist Domingo del Monte and his cohorts, the Cuban exiles Félix Varela (del Monte’s former philosophy professor and a priest) and Tomás Gener (a wealthy Catalonian plantation owner from Matanzas) strongly advised their colleagues against translating and publishing Charles Comte’s Traité de legislation.¹ Comte, a respected law professor and permanent secretary of L’Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques in Paris, published his treatise in 1826 on the natural and moral laws that determine the conditions and potential for the advancement of diverse peoples across the globe. Del Monte probably became familiar with some of the volumes from the treatise at the gatherings of Cuban intellectuals around Varela and José Antonio Saco, the most renowned of this group, in New York and Philadelphia in 1829. Apart from Comte’s assertion that warm climates do not produce the effects on people that have been attributed to them and that the inhabitants of cold countries are generally no freer, no more active, nor more virtuous than those from warm countries, the most important section of the study for del Monte and his colleagues was the last book of the treatise, which tackles the subject of slavery. According to Varela’s and Gener’s letter, the idea behind translating Comte’s study for Cuban readers was to bring the discussion of slavery into the open in order to educate public opinion and gain support for abolishing the slave trade. Writing about slavery in Cuba, especially during Captain-General Miguel Tacón’s administration (1834–38), was practically outlawed.² Under such circumstances, it was necessary to articulate criticism indirectly, and even then with due caution. Leading intellectuals, such as Cuba’s foremost poet, José María Heredia, and Saco, had been exiled because they dared to execute frontal attacks on Spanish imperialism and the slave trade. Hence, the translation of Comte’s study was intended to bring about a change in public opinion about the slave trade employing an oblique approach through intellectual forums and discussion.

The importance of Varela’s and Gener’s letter lies in the clarity with which it points out the dilemma in which the Creole reformist bourgeoisie found itself at that time. In arguing against making Comte’s study available to readers in Cuba, both men listed the reasons why the translation, instead of aiding the reformists’ cause, would end up strengthening the arguments of those who wanted the slave trade to continue: the translation, they thought, would be censored; if not, any discussion of the extension of freedoms for whites would set a dangerous precedent for blacks and the free colored. The text, as a result, risked being considered incendiary, and, given the high regard that most Cuban Creoles had for their learning, fine manners, and well-being, Comte’s view that the education of whites would be deficient so long as they were raised among slaves would be regarded as insulting and undeserved. Varela and Gener subsequently juxtaposed two statements that capture the Creole reformists’ dilemmas about freedom and its limits and their concern about being misunderstood because, even though they belonged to the powerful local bourgeoisie, they rejected abolitionism. In the first of these, they maintained that “in many places, it is openly said that it is an injustice to claim freedom for whites and deny it to blacks,” and, in the second, they asserted that in Cuba “the blacks’ enslavement is the cause of the whites’ enslavement. The people know it all too well, and the government knows it all too well.”³ I would like to take a closer look at Varela’s and Gener’s reference to the inequality of freedom for whites and blacks and illustrate the manner in which both statements are related, for the purpose of bridging what appears to be a gap between a broad ethical debate about the universal rights of man and the local stance within a colonial framework from which these reformists viewed and assimilated the debate. This explanation provides the context for my principal goal in this chapter, which is to show how del Monte’s and his fellow reformists’ efforts to emancipate local literary writing from colonial censorship constituted a response to the apparent incompatibility of two forms of liberalism that informed their class and its political aspirations—an incompatibility for which the reformists were partly responsible despite their remonstrance to the contrary.

This chapter’s contextualization of the Creole reformist bourgeoisie’s attitude toward chattel slavery challenges Hegel’s claim in his introduction to The Philosophy of History that “what takes place in America is but an emanation from Europe.”⁴ The philosopher’s statement fails to account for the ways in which the Americas, beginning as early as the sixteenth century, were regulated by a colonial jurisdiction that often contradicted legal and moral positions that European nations upheld for themselves on the other side of the Atlantic. According to Ian Baucom, the New World was “early occidental modernity’s exemplary space of exception,” which means that countervailing local circumstances, such as Varela’s and Gener’s suggestion that colonial subjugation complicated and impeded their readiness to subscribe to European abolitionist humanitarianism, were not just common but paradigmatic experiences in the western hemisphere.⁵ Abolitionist humanitarianism—with its reliance on the ability of the abolitionists to become what Baucom calls “sympathetic observers” and, through the writing and reading of Romantic melancholy literature, vicarious “witnesses” to the sufferings of slaves from a distance—did not “emanate” from Europe and spread unchallenged throughout the hemisphere. Such concern and sentiment for the welfare of enslaved others emerged from the philosophical side of the Atlantic’s culture of speculation; and even though this humanitarianism worked in conjunction with its speculative financial counterpart (economic liberalism), these liberalisms became highly incongruent for the Spanish colony’s economically powerful Creole bourgeoisie in ways that stymied their ability to act decisively on the political front. Rafael Rojas argues that Cuban political culture in the nineteenth century was polarized between a fusion of economic liberalism and a national project founded on the technological modernization of agriculture, on one side, and the development of a theological and philosophical moral discourse—led by intellectuals like Varela—on the other.⁶ Under these circumstances, the most radical elements of the local bourgeoisie chose reform over cosmopolitan abolitionist humanitarianism. The first section of this chapter provides an account of how the Creole reformists, who, in perceiving themselves to be enslaved by slavery, attempted to define their stances vis-à-vis two forms of related liberalisms. I explore the way in which Varela and Gener imply that the Creole bourgeoisie could not approach the universal and abstract dimensions of the debate about freedom without first attending to the local implications of this debate.

The chapter’s second section examines how the uncensored literary reading, writing, and sentiments that Domingo del Monte failed to foment in a public institution but eventually encouraged in the literary circle of reformists that met at his home provided the circle’s members with an opportunity to imagine and produce a literature that would praise their local way of life and illustrate the difficulties of living under colonial rule. The literary, in other words, became the means by which the reformists sought to reconcile both liberalisms for their own immediate context. Because the circle’s activities took place in private, almost clandestine, retreat from the colony’s antagonistic political life and the scrutiny of the reformists’ powerful enemies in the colonial government, the documentation to which we have access describing the discussions that took place in del Monte’s salon is scarce and can mostly be found scattered piecemeal in the correspondence that the patrician received from roughly 1834 to 1840 and that was posthumously collected. Nevertheless, these sources are adequate to form an idea of the Creole reformists’ writing practices within and outside the literary circle; del Monte’s influence on the reading and writing that took place in their gatherings; the circle’s interest in and debate about literary Romanticism; and, last but not least, the uncomfortable exchange between del Monte and the young writer Anselmo Suárez y Romero concerning the kind of speech that best suited the slave protagonist in the latter’s novel. Despite the relative freedom that some of these activities granted the circle’s members, the stoicism that characterized the slave protagonists and characters in their writings are related to the besieged political situation in which the circle and the Creole reformist bourgeoisie found themselves.

In the chapter’s final section, I describe the circumstances in which del Monte introduced Juan Francisco Manzano to the members of his literary circle and interrogate the resonances that the poem that the enslaved poet recited there might have had for the gathering’s members. Manzano, whose poetic voice del Monte must have considered appropriate for the occasion, recites his sonnet in a context in which the “eloquent complaint” was one of the most effective ways of appealing for justice under the slave code at that time.⁷ The purpose of this exploration is to examine this event as an opportunity for mutual recognition and the fostering of empathy between a legally enslaved subject and a room of slaveholders, who also prided themselves on being what David Brion Davis might have called “men of feeling.” In this last section, I show how the sonnet that Manzano recited for the members of the circle provides a bridge to the abstract dimensions of the debate about universal rights for all men.

COLONIAL LIBERALISMS

What were the two forms of liberalism that became dangerously incompatible for the Creole reformist bourgeoisie in Cuba? One of these liberalisms is informed by the modern discourse on the universal extension of rights, fruit of the emancipatory project of Enlightenment philosophies. By the 1830s, slavery was the subject of ongoing philosophical and legal deliberations among the political, commercial, religious, and intellectual elite of the Western world and was frequently understood as incongruous with the extension of these rights. The other liberalism emerges conjointly as the promulgation of strategies for liberalizing trade that is known as economic liberalism. Because of Cuba’s rapid increase in sugar production after the Haitian Revolution, Spain alone could not absorb the island’s economic boom, and the Cuban bourgeoisie looked increasingly toward establishing commercial ties with Britain, the United States, and France. Slavery was also a crucial issue with respect to economic liberalism in Cuba because not only did this regime of forced labor generate spectacular profits; according to Manuel Moreno Fraginals, the traffic in slaves was a commercial activity in which segments of the bourgeoisie had acquired extensive experience in important aspects of free trade.⁸

The social sustainability of the incongruities between these liberalisms constituted an important internal debate in modern nations at the time. The reformists, who were members of the Creole bourgeoisie that came on the scene because of Cuba’s special trading status with nations outside of Spain, attempted to regulate this incompatibility to their advantage and sought to create a community based on a particular cultural notion of “civilized” but stateless nationhood. The reformists’ eventual failure to manage the incompatibility between these liberalisms cannot be blamed entirely on their class and political persuasions: the ability of the island’s Creole political, economic, and intellectual leadership to address the contradiction between both liberalisms in Cuba was rigorously circumscribed. However, it was also the idea of a unique local community that the Creole reformists eventually entertained—one that, as far as they were concerned, was negatively influenced by the proximity of a black republic in neighboring Haiti and the presence of a large black and mulatto population in their midst—that reproduced some of the incongruities that they sought to resolve. In order to approach the local incompatibility between these liberalisms, I would like to begin with the “universal” dimension of this issue of injustice and work toward Varela’s and Gener’s allusion to slavery’s enslavement of whites in Cuba.

In the introduction, I alluded to Susan Buck-Morss’s argument that slavery was more than a mere metaphor for Hegel, who kept abreast of the Haitian Revolution at the same time that he was writing Phenomenology of Spirit. Yet this call for the historicizing of philosophical ideas already represents an advance on views that tend to restate the Enlightenment’s internal contradictions without providing a way to explain them. For example, in an extensively researched book, Adam Hochschild’s Bury the Chains, one reads the following:

The 1700s were, of course, the century of Enlightenment, the upwelling of ideas about human rights that eventually led to the American and French revolutions, expanded suffrage, and much more. Yet surprisingly few people saw a contradiction between freedom for whites and bondage for slaves. The British Parliament had never debated the morality of slavery or the slave trade. The philosopher John Locke, whose ideas about governments arising from the consent of the governed had done so much to lay the foundation for this century of revolutions, invested $600 in the Royal African Company, whose RAC brand was seared onto the breasts of thousands of slaves. In France, Voltaire mocked slaveholders in Candide and other works, yet when a leading French slave ship owner offered to name a vessel after him, he accepted with pleasure.⁹

Even though these facts are verifiable and their delivery well-intentioned, their arrangement as oppositions between historical figures—cast as wholly and consciously representative of liberal democratic thought—and their simultaneous involvement in some of slavery’s brutal practices does not facilitate access to the motivations and forces that led to these apparent paradoxes. Presented in this manner, these paradoxes are misleading not simply because their selective juxtaposition sensationalizes the facts but mostly because the ethical questions that they are meant to raise get constituted as unwieldy oppositions between the material reality of chattel slavery and uncomplicated figures that stand in for the Enlightenment’s ideals and epistemologies. Hochschild is interested in highlighting the frequency with which some of these important thinkers were apparently blind to the ways in which they participated in slavery, but he develops no hypothesis about the nature of this “blindness.” Somewhere in this approach to the paradoxical coincidence of Enlightenment thought and the material reality of slavery lies the notion that these formidable thinkers possessed the intelligence to know better, or at least to avoid succumbing to the most hegemonic immoral institutions of their time. As this line of argument implies, these men fell from the lofty heights of their lucidity: how could their wisdom not have saved them from the pitfalls of this moral hypocrisy? According to Mary Nyquist, Locke’s rejection of what she calls political slavery—in my study the analogy would be the reformists’ critique of colonialism—at the same time that he defends the slaveholder’s right to own slaves provides evidence of “antityrannicism’s plasticity.”¹⁰

A more compelling approach to the injustices to which Varela and Gener refer is Davis’s argument that even though there was nothing new about New World slavery in the 1760s, what was unprecedented about this and the following decade was a shift in moral consciousness that affected “the ways in which Western culture had organized man’s experience with lordship and bondage.”¹¹ According to the historian, four interrelated developments in Western culture were responsible for this transformation, especially in the area of British Protestantism. They include the emergence of secular social philosophy, which sought to redefine human bondage for a modern rational world; the spread of an ethic of benevolence that the “man of feeling” came to personify; the growing importance of instantaneous conversion in evangelicalism; and a change in attitude toward the Negro’s cultural difference among eighteenth-century “primitivists,” who, in the travel accounts and descriptions of exotic lands that they read about and wrote, attempted to illustrate that man’s virtue and creativity were inherent.¹² However, even as this shift in moral consciousness was under way, countervailing forces and activities were also at work. Assessing the whol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Liberalisms at Odds: Slavery and the Struggle for an Autochthonous Literature
• 2 In Spite of Himself: Unconscious Resistance and Melancholy Attachments in Manzano’s Autobiography
• 3 Being Adequate to the Task: An Abolitionist Translates the Desire to Be Free
• 4 Freedom without Equality: Slave Protagonists, Free Blacks, and Their Bodies
• Epilogue
• Appendix: “My Thirty Years”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index