The idea that it is possible to describe a human being as “white,” “black,” or any color, and that such chromatic distinctions could constitute authorized categories of human differentiation, emerged for the first time in Plantation America. By “Plantation America” I refer to the specific geography and climates (tropical, semitropical) in which large plantations arose, stretching from the southern United States, through Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, and extending through similar climates in Latin America above and below the equator. However, I also want the term to allude to plantation practices that emerged throughout this region but whose exact origins remain undocumented or imprecise. When colonizing Europeans landed in the Americas, they arrived with an understanding of human difference based on both geographical origin and an individual’s or community’s adherence to, rejection of, or ignorance about a particular religious faith (Jews, Muslims, Christians, infidels, and pagans). It is no surprise, therefore, that European theologians and jurists, whose deliberations counseled Spanish monarchs on the legitimacy of extending their sovereignty over the western hemisphere, spent the first half of the sixteenth century debating whether the so-called Indian possessed a soul. Central to this debate, in other words, was the status of the “Indian” as potential Christian subject or soulless laboring body. This encounter with a peopled continent that never appears in the scriptures challenged early modern thinkers to account for a purported new world, placing intellectual approaches to the unknown, such as scholasticism and an incipient empiricism, in direct competition.Footnote ¹ Even though the imagined newness of the expropriated territories presented intellectual, legal, theological, and moral challenges to European institutions, imperial projects also provided vast economic opportunities for the anthropocentric exploitation of natural and human resources. It is in this crucible that large plantations arose first in the Caribbean, to then become exportable models of socioeconomic organization for other regions in the hemisphere.

Reference Haraway, Ishikawa, Gilbert, Olwig, Tsing and BubandtDonna Haraway, Anna Tsing and other scholars have proposed the Plantationocene as a geomorphic human epoch that they associate with the inception of European colonialism in the Americas. Following their lead, other theorists identify the Caribbean as the specific site that marks the emergence of this new epoch. Accordingly, the Plantationocene describes

Although this definition succinctly captures the history of early modern imperialism in the Caribbean, I would like to call attention to an understudied feature of these imperial projects that informs my approach to the collection of narratives that emerged roughly between 1838 and 1841 in Cuba and that have been loosely and inadequately called “antislavery.” Accounts of the European colonization of the Americas that foreground the acquisition of territories and sovereignty as successful feats of imperial power at the expense of acknowledging the simultaneously accidental, experimental, and improvisational nature of these undertakings are partial at most. The newness of this world for explorers and colonizers was both opportune and challenging, and it would be misleading to approach the inner workings of the imperial projects that gave rise to the Plantationocene as if they had not also been speculative, ad hoc, and occasionally improvised ventures. Imperial projects were also perilous, precarious, overdetermined as well as overextended, and anxiety-producing enterprises for the perpetrators and victims of immediate and slow demographic and environmental violence.Footnote ²

The societies that developed in the Caribbean and the rest of Plantation America retained this dynamic relationship between method and improvisation while laying their foundations. By the second half of the seventeenth century, improvised concepts of racial differentiation informed a foundational ideology through which colonizers rationalized their demand for labor using ad hoc moral alibis to mark, distinguish, and categorize designated bodies and communities. Yet these racializing processes had begun earlier. The gradual moral shift in Europe during the first two decades of the sixteenth century, from determining the monarchy’s responsibilities toward indigenous communities in the Americas to a strategically improvised proposition on human difference – one that drew scholastically from Aristotle’s notion of natural slavery in Politics and claimed that the “Indian” was a slave by nature because his body and emotions reigned over his intellect and soul – initiated a racializing discourse on the appropriateness of nonwhite bodies for plantation labor. Even Bartolomé de Las Casas, acclaimed defender of the western hemisphere’s indigenous communities, stumbled with devastating consequences into the moral quagmire of recommending the organized introduction of African slaves into the western hemisphere to alleviate the decimation of its indigenous population. He lived to regret his advisory role in the opening of the transatlantic slave trade. In short, what links the Plantationocene to the period when the Cuban novel began to emerge, and beyond, is the gradual, compounding formulation of biopolitical processes of white and nonwhite racialization as foundational imperial strategies for regulating economic resources throughout Plantation America.

Examining how settlers and their descendants continued to cobble together, authorize, and implement such processes of racialization on their plantations provides us with a way to read the autochthonous narratives that emerged in Cuba in the 1830s and 1840s, not strictly as literary and cultural artifacts but as a continual engagement with the complex presences and shifting states of Blackness and Black-and-white miscegenation on the island. These narratives, most of which were penned in and around Domingo del Monte’s literary circle, include Petrona y Rosalía (1838) by Félix Tanco y Bosmeniel (1797–1871); Francisco, el ingenio o las delicias del campo (1838–1839) [Francisco, the Sugar Mill, or the Delights of the Countryside] by Anselmo Suárez y Romero; the short story “Cecilia Valdés” (1839), which Cirilo Villaverde (1812–1894) would later develop into Cuba’s most acclaimed nineteenth-century novel, Cecilia Valdés o La Loma del Ángel (1882); Autobiografía de un esclavo (1840) [Autobiography of a Slave] by Juan Francisco Manzano (1797–1853), the only slave-authored narrative that has surfaced in the Spanish-speaking world to date; and Sab (1841) by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1814–1873).Footnote ³ Considered one of Cuba’s first literary critics, del Monte (1804–1853) was a slave-owning patrician and leading member of the reformist criollo bourgeoisie, an influential minority within the broader Cuban bourgeoisie that endeavored to distinguish itself from the latter by arguing for the gradual abolition of slavery and the simultaneous increase of white settlers to the island.Footnote ⁴ Under del Monte’s leadership, the reformists fought to create an uncensored, autochthonous literature that would reflect on and engage with their own circumstances and future. Before the establishment of the circle, literary activities would take place under the Comisión Permanente de Literatura, which was the literary branch of the pro-Spanish Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País, an institution that limited its view of the educational and cultural progress of the island to agricultural and industrial development. Through secret negotiations with allies in the royal court in Madrid, del Monte and his reformist cohort received permission in 1834 to reconstitute the Comisión as an autonomous Academia Literaria. Nevertheless, the Sociedad Económica promptly derailed the reformists’ effort to create this new space for literary writing. It was at this point that del Monte opened his palacete, or mansion, in Havana to the circle’s private meetings.

Cuba’s first novels thus emerged through private discussions in which the circle’s members negotiated connections between witnessed and metaphorical enslavement in their didactic attempts to foster a critical attitude toward slavery among the island’s slaveholders and to question their own colonial predicament. Among the transatlantic promulgators of antislavery sentiments, therefore, the distinctiveness of the criollo reformist bourgeoisie’s stance cannot be overstated. Whereas British abolitionists could introduce slave narratives and select literary texts as antislavery evidence in Parliament, the criollo reformists, whose interest in gradual abolition isolated them from the rest of the Cuban bourgeoisie, were limited to clandestine discussions and writing. Moreover, the majority of British abolitionists pursued their antislavery agenda as physically distant activists for whom moral disinterestedness and the virtual witnessing of human suffering through the publication and reading of slave narratives informed their politics; on the other hand, the proximity of the criollo reformists to the conditions of slaves on their plantations and the former’s experiences of Spanish colonial rule provided them with opportunities to denounce slavery, not as an end in itself, but as a step toward imagining the horizon and limits of their own autonomy.

The literature that emerged from del Monte’s circle offers a distinctive purview that cannot be reduced to a mimetic, transatlantic antislavery writing. Although del Monte introduced the members of the circle to Walter Scott, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and, specifically, to Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal (1826), which was meant to serve as a model for imagining a Black protagonist, other events and actions illustrated the reformists’ unique circumstances. For example, it was at del Monte’s request, while Manzano was still enslaved, that the latter penned the first part of his autobiography for a cosmopolitan antislavery cause with which he was unfamiliar. The circle’s members encouraged Suárez y Romero as he modeled his Francisco on Manzano’s life story, without, as far as we can tell, the latter’s permission. In 1840, seven years after the British abolition of slavery, the Irish abolitionist Richard Robert Madden smuggled both texts out of Cuba and translated and published Manzano’s autobiography in English as proof of the cruelty of Cuban slavery for the first World Anti-Slavery Convention in London that year. That Villaverde elaborated a mulata protagonist in his 1839 short story “Cecilia Valdés” gave rise to a gendered and specifically racialized figure that he would develop to great acclaim in the definitive version of the novel, which he published in New York City in 1882. Finally, Gómez de Avellaneda, who did not belong to the Delmontine circle but who also crafted a mulato protagonist, published Sab in Madrid in 1841, though the work would be immediately banned in Cuba, where it would not be published until 1914.Footnote ⁵ These unique circumstances invite us to evaluate the urgency of and anxieties around the circle’s literary writing and publication from the specificity of its members’ antislavery stance. Its authors portrayed enslaved protagonists as morally superior to self-indulgent or depraved masters. However, even as the writers gave voice to their protagonists, their narratives consistently depict submissive and frustrated lead characters whose desires for freedom invariably lead to their demise and to a foreclosure of their agency beyond the critical issues of the day.

In this chapter, I read the reformists’ writing as modes of speculative literary creation that foreground their approaches to Cuba’s circumstances and prospects in the 1840s and the places of the Black, mulato, and white criollo population in the island’s future. Speculative writing simultaneously (re)negotiates the past and future. Because speculation builds on the past, these texts harken to the morally spontaneous, ideologically opportunistic, and violent processes of anti-Black racialization that arose early on plantations – enduring processes that, toward the latter half of the eighteenth century, positioned enslaved Black and brown bodies at the center of entangled relations between speculative finance capital and moral reflections on freedom.Footnote ⁶ As these authors ascertained Cuba’s future as a multiracial slaveholding Spanish colony, the incorporation of Black and mulato characters in their writings was not limited to a costumbrista urge toward autochthonous self-representation. These reformists firmly believed that slavery enslaved them.Footnote ⁷ Their writers fetishized Black and brown bodies in ways that illustrate anxious attempts at managing the presence, inherited views, and future of Blackness on the island, while they also contemplated and tested the degrees of autonomy that they themselves might enjoy under colonial rule. Therefore, the principal concern in these narratives that gave birth to the Cuban novel was the criollo reformist bourgeoisie’s desire to criticize the pivotal role that slavery played in Spain’s colonial subjugation of the island and in the slave-owning classes’ dependence on a labor regime that brutalized enslaved and enslaver alike. In a letter to the Spanish Cortes in 1835, José Antonio Saco (1797–1879), one of the reformists’ ideologues, argued that the end of the slave trade should also be accompanied by increased white colonization because, he asserted, economic progress, artistic perfection, and all forms of Cuban prosperity would rely on this whitening of the island’s population (32). Consequently, the narratives that these reformists penned and discussed in del Monte’s circle are not antislavery primarily because abolitionist philanthropic humanitarianism motivated their authors. Rather, and without entirely dismissing their capacity for sympathetically acknowledging the plight of the enslaved, these authors focused their didactic criticism of the slave-owning classes on the damage that slavery’s practices were wreaking on Cuba’s potential to become the civilized, mostly white society or nation that they imagined and desired. The freedom that mattered most to the criollo reformist bourgeoisie in the 1830s and 1840s was the dream of their own delivery from slavery, its descendants, and Spanish colonial policies that kept the island amply supplied with slaves. For the reformists and the writers in del Monte’s circle, there could be no vision of an autonomous, civilized society without tackling and resolving the slavery question and its long and deep historical and cultural influences on Cuba.

The 1841 Census and Speculative Writing

Cuba’s 1841 census revealed that slaves constituted 436,495 or 43.3 percent of the population and that the whites numbered 418,291 or 41.5 percent (Reference PaquettePaquette 198, n43). Given the white fear of being outnumbered by Blacks – that is, of the island purportedly becoming Africanized, another Haiti – these figures were greeted with concern, disbelief, and controversy. The slightly higher percentage of slaves represented the success of a colonial policy to sustain a large population of slaves for economic growth and, strategically, to dissuade the Cuban bourgeoisie from striving for political independence since, given the white supremacist ideas (reinforced by racist pseudoscientific theories like polygenesis) that imbued thinking in the Americas and Europe about progress, civilization, and nation-building at the time, the idea of creating a mixed-race nation was out of the question.Footnote ⁸ However, the narratives that emerged inside and outside del Monte’s circle – it is worth reiterating that they were penned shortly before the census – not only created Black and brown protagonists whose bodies and eventual demise were central to their plots, but also recognized and augured the rise of enslaved and free mulatos and free Blacks as visible social actors.Footnote ⁹ I contend that the primary object of speculative writing for the reformists was the persistent emergence of subjects whose ambiguous racial and/or socioeconomic status either reinforced or challenged the colony’s social hierarchies, thereby obliging colonial authorities to improvise methods for disciplining this population.Footnote ¹⁰ By their very existence, mulatos and free Blacks eluded and defied the biopolitical racializing strategies that characterized the Plantationocene during the early colonial period, such as the antimiscegenation laws that extended throughout Plantation America and that gradually led to identifying Blacks with enslavement and whites with freedom. As Jennifer L. Morgan argues, the miscegenated child represented a circulating and unregulated “excess” that induced social “chaos” for colonial authorities (Reference Morgan“Partus” 6). Despite deliberate colonial efforts to intensify the segregation of Blacks and whites in Cuba, especially during the nineteenth century after Spain lost its mainland empire, the narratives imagine and highlight the lives of Blacks and mulatos whose membership in or aspiration to join a growing petty bourgeoisie of color rendered them appropriate protagonists within the colony.

Even though colonial legislatures introduced laws to eliminate doubts about the significance of skin color and social status, slave owners were themselves responsible for giving rise to these transgressive uncertainties and their attendant moral challenges. One of the cruelest laws to originate in Plantation America was partus sequitur ventrem, an ordinance that rendered enslavement inheritable by stipulating that the free or enslaved condition of the mother would determine the child’s status. This law began as an effort to specify the legal status of the child born to a couple in which one of the parents was enslaved. However, the regulation also replaced the patrilineage that characterized European and early colonial socioeconomic life with a matrilineal transmission of human bondage that exposed enslaved African and African-descended women to sexual violence, destroyed their kinship and family life, and transformed their reproductive capacity into a source of managed material inventory. Narratives that primarily focus on the relentless pursuit of enslaved women by their masters or masters’ sons, which is the case of Tanco y Bosmeniel’s Petrona y Rosalía and Suárez y Romero’s Francisco, engage the historical consequences of partus sequitur ventrem by illustrating the ubiquity of sexual violence in plantation societies. Providing the perspective of a child who inherited his enslaved condition, Manzano’s Autobiografía de un esclavo also illustrates the “perverse mothering” to which his mistresses subjected him in the households where he labored.Footnote ¹¹ In addition to making the paternity of enslaved children practically irrelevant, this law placed enslaved Black and mulato women at the center of anxious and obsessive efforts on the part of slaveholders and colonial authorities to establish and uphold notions of racial composition and difference.Footnote ¹²

Despite the law’s original intent, plots that unfold around the pursuit of enslaved women indicate how partus sequitur ventrem gave slave masters license to subject their female slaves to sexual violence and father offspring whose status the measure had been devised to regulate in the first place. For example, Petrona and her daughter, Rosalía, live immersed in a vicious cycle of sexual abuse that their master, Don Antonio, and his son, Don Fernando, perpetuate generationally. The incestuous relation that her young master, who is also her half-brother, forces on Rosalía ends with her death in childbirth, and Petrona’s death shortly after her daughter’s leads the slave owners in the last line of the novel to equate libidinal and financial excesses nonchalantly: “¡Paciencia […] se han perdido mil pesos!” [Patience … we’re out of a thousand pesos!”] (Reference Tanco y BosmenielTanco y Bosmeniel 48; my translation). Nevertheless, the intimation or threat of incest that looms around the pursuit of the often mixed-race object of desire in these narratives captures how these slave masters fetishize the white criollo bourgeoisie’s taboo around transgressing racializing norms. If Don Fernando attributes his sexual aggressions to the sanctuary of men’s affairs, which is how he responds to his mother’s admonitions, the plot in Suárez y Romero’s Francisco revolves around the pathological obsession with which Ricardo, the young master, pursues his mother’s personal slave, Dorotea.Footnote ¹³ The aggressiveness of these young slave masters’ sexual proclivities is revealing. It suggests that beyond the victimhood of their class’s melancholy anticolonial lament that slavery enslaved them – a moral alibi through which the reformist criollo bourgeoisie justified its attachment to either Spanish colonialism or annexation to the US (prior to the Civil War) as the sole options for the island’s posterity – the uncontrollable libidinal propensities of these slave masters show otherwise. The pleasure and impunity with which they transgressed racialized sexual taboos bound them to a future of inextricable relations with their slaves and their miscegenated offspring.

Villaverde’s 1839 short story “Cecilia Valdés” and novella of the same year bypass the urgent plots of nineteenth-century transatlantic abolitionism in favor of capturing the complex embeddedness of Blackness and miscegenation in Cuba’s colonial society after almost three centuries of slavery. The subsequent elaboration of the mulata protagonist, Cecilia Valdés, over the course of four decades demonstrates Villaverde’s steadfast attention to the importance of mixed-race ancestries and the psychologically internalized practices of blanqueamiento (the eugenicist aspiration to produce whiter progeny) in the socioeconomic prospects that the young, beautiful mulata might enjoy as she attaches herself to the allure of wealth and white supremacy. Unbeknownst to Cecilia and Leonardo, her white criollo lover in the definitive novel, they share the same father. Indeed, the extensive critical attention that has been paid to miscegenation as a social phenomenon on the island – and, especially, to the frequent literary pairing of miscegenation and incest or its threat – is greater and more illuminating about Cuba’s speculated futures than what we can learn by simply identifying Villaverde’s narratives with a cosmopolitan abolitionist movement.Footnote ¹⁴ What can we learn from this coupling of miscegenation and incest as a literary topos in the first stirrings of the Cuban novel?

Even though Villaverde’s novel introduces Cecilia as a free mulata, the presumption with which Leonardo identifies her as an object of sexual desire external to marriage and bourgeois domesticity reinstantiates the licentious practices that partus sequitur ventrem conceded to slave owners. It is no surprise, therefore, that Leonardo juxtaposes Cecilia’s sensuous beauty to the incarnation of white, bourgeois rectitude that Isabel, to whom he is betrothed, represents. Yet by lingering extendedly on Cecilia’s features and mannerisms when she first appears in the novel, the omniscient narrator presents her as an object of desire who, unaware, tantalizes as she nonchalantly transgresses and confounds the social boundaries and esthetic hierarchies of racial and class belonging. What starts as the narrator’s rhetorical inquiry – “¿A qué raza, pues, pertenecía esta muchacha? Difícil es decirlo” (Villaverde 73) [“To what race, then, did this girl belong? It is difficult to say”] (Cecilia Valdés or El Angel Hill 13) – leads to the revelation of the narrator’s and the criollo reader’s privileged “ojo conocedor” (73) [“knowing eye”] (13), which penetrates the surface features of the miscegenated protagonist to uncover the subtleties of her Black and white lineages and revel in that local knowledge. Under this scrutiny, Cecilia emerges as an object of desire who, in adhering to blanqueamiento, embodies, mirrors, and projects the narcissism of white supremacy. In these narratives, the (potential) perpetrator of incest is a white man who enjoys unimpeded access to mixed-race bodies that can reveal or perpetuate his likeness. Given literary representations in which enslaved subjects are often fetishized in the plantation’s libidinal economies to stand in for incestuous relations among members of the slaveholding classes, Leonardo’s lust for Cecilia must also be viewed in the context of the protagonist’s striking resemblance to his sister and her half-sister, Adela. The topos of conjoining miscegenation and incest therefore provides these narratives with a tragic structure for white criollo identity and posterity during the nineteenth century through which the transcendence of Blackness was both desirable and impossible.

Published in Spain in 1841, though banned in Cuba, Gómez de Avellaneda’s depiction of the eponymous protagonist of her novel Sab offers a sophisticated rendering of indeterminate racialization for speculative reading. Introducing Sab, the narrator states: “Su rostro presentaba un compuesto singular en que se descubría el cruzamiento de dos razas diversas, y en que se amalgaban, por decirlo así, los rasgos de la casta africana con los de la europea, sin ser no obstante un mulato perfecto” (Reference Gómez de Avellaneda and ServeraSab 104) [“His face was a singular composite which revealed the mingling of two different races, an amalgam, it could be said of the features of the African and European, yet without being a perfect mulatto”] (Reference Gómez de Avellaneda and ScottSab and Autobiography 28). Sab’s racial indeterminacy permits a discourse about the economic viability of his master’s sugar plantation for Otway, his young mistress’s suitor – a man steeped in a mercantilist and speculative spirit (Reference Villaverde and FischerCecilia Valdés or El Angel Hill 121) – who mistook him for white. Yet, as the plantation overseer, he also provides his interlocutor, to whom he subsequently reveals his enslaved condition, with the novel’s first expression of an antislavery sentiment. Straddling and articulating the master’s and slaves’ stances, Sab is both charged with ensuring the plantation’s solvency and privy to clandestine networks capable of fomenting a slave rebellion. His ability to assume the outlooks of both masters and slaves evokes a scenario of competing futures, and his racially indeterminate body portends the volatility of contingent circumstances in a context in which colonial authorities polarized Blacks and whites to maintain their hold on the island. On the one hand, Sab embodies the unavoidable consequences of the imposed strategies of racialization that characterized the long history of Plantation America – that is, the emergence of a miscegenated population that destabilized the colonies’ improvised but enforced categories of human differentiation. On the other hand, his transcendence of the binaries of master/slave and white/black anticipates the danger that intermediary figures, such as mulatos and an economically burgeoning class of free people of color, represented for colonial authorities. Three years later these authorities, in determining that these groups could tip the balance in a racially polarized colony, would accuse them of fomenting a conspiracy to provoke an island-wide slave rebellion.

Crisis, Speculation, and Conspiracy

The controversial 1841 census highlighted more than the reality of the Black presence on the island. It foregrounded anxieties about the island’s immediate future that were informed by local class and racial tensions around the slavery question; the geopolitical competition between Spain, England, and the US to determine the role of slavery in the island’s future; the greater frequency of localized slave rebellions; and the increasing fear of abolitionist conspiracies on and off the island, especially from 1840 to 1842, when the radical British abolitionist David Turnbull had been stationed in Cuba.Footnote ¹⁵ Cubans, according to the narrator in Sab, lived in a constant state of alarm. The white elite felt “backed into a corner” because “external forces beyond their control seemed to be heading them to the realization of their omnipresent class and racial fears” (Reference PaquettePaquette 249). In the panicked awareness of the 1830s and 1840s that enslaved people might not be as submissive as the criollo bourgeoisie preferred to believe, the latter began shifting its representation of them from docility to that of menacing, hyper-racialized peril – that is, to a proactive stance against Black empowerment that allowed Cuban slaveholders to close ranks with colonial authorities in defense of commonly held notions of white supremacy.Footnote ¹⁶

Yet the narratives that were penned in and around del Monte’s literary circle had already anticipated two of the outcomes that colonial authorities violently imposed on Black and brown bodies in the island-wide crisis of 1844. First, the reduction of the protagonist to a cruelly punished, fetishized Black body in Suárez y Romero’s Francisco – a brutality that the author had extrapolated from Manzano’s autobiography – eerily presages the torture of hundreds of bodies as the Military Commission under Captain General Leopoldo O’Donnell identified, arrested, and tortured the alleged organizers of a generalized slave rebellion that colonial authorities called the Escalera [Ladder] Conspiracy. Curiously, the authorities did not name specific conspiracists but highlighted the method by which hundreds of bodies were stretched across ladders and whipped, frequently to death. There had, in other words, been more to the obsessive punishment of Francisco’s body beyond human endurance. In a period of fear and anxiety regarding the future of slavery in Cuba, the slave’s body was an object of increased discipline. The slaveholding bourgeoisie’s flouting of Madrid’s reformist Slave Codes of 1789 and 1842, which prohibited more than twenty-five lashes for serious offenses, appears obliquely in Francisco as the exact accounting of lashes beyond the prohibition that the slaveholder, Ricardo, demanded for Francisco. Whether so broad a conspiracy ever existed continues to be debated today, but the crackdown, described by witnesses as reminiscent of the Inquisition or of Dante’s Inferno, succeeded in decimating the leadership of the free Blacks and mulatos who constituted the island’s petty bourgeoisie and in eliminating the criollo voices of reform, several of whom were imprisoned or fled into exile. Still on the defensive from exile in Europe, del Monte wrote to Alexander Everett, the former US minister to Spain, stating that he had rebuffed an abolitionist for “judging me capable of committing the madness of sacrificing the tranquility of my country and the existence of my race, to the liberty of blacks” (qtd. in Reference PaquettePaquette 249).

Second, a new and strident attitude toward free Blacks and mulatos emerged. The slave regulations that Madrid issued in 1844 concentrated on this population as never before. They ordered all free, foreign-born, male adults to leave Cuba within fifteen days; called for the expulsion of all emancipated slaves who had completed their civil and religious education; prohibited “any person of color, free or slave” from disembarking on the island; sought to scrutinize the activities of the free colored population who rented land in the country; and severely punished crimes against whites (Reference PaquettePaquette 273). Ambiguous subjects, like Cecilia and Sab, whose racial composition, social station, and actions confounded colonial distinctions between slavery and freedom, were suddenly rendered suspect.

To evaluate the narratives that originated in del Monte’s circle as speculative literary writing means emphasizing the urgency with which its members regarded literature as an important esthetic and political engagement with the overwhelming crises of their place and time. In this light, their unprecedented creation of Black and brown protagonists in narratives that became some of Cuba’s first novels constitutes both an inherited engagement with historical processes of racialization in Plantation America and an anxious projection of racialized futures for the island. The ostensible antislavery position that this speculative writing assumes thus pertains to the singularity of their context and to the uniqueness of the reformists’ motives as they sought to transcend the inextricability of their relationship with the people whom they enslaved and their descendants.