Despite the sterling and welcome efforts of much scholarship on Cuba in recent years, correcting and refining our view of Cuba's racial history, the fact is that many of those who address the question of black rebellion in Cuba before 1868 (that is, before the start of Cuba's first war of independence) still tend either to read that history in terms of isolated and scattered conspiracies (usually Masonic, republican or liberal) or, alternatively, to focus on the bloody 1844 Escalera episode. This excellent study, however, takes one such ‘conspiracy’ – the Aponte affair of 1812 – and seeks, successfully, to restore it to its rightful place, as the most significant political movement by slaves and free people of colour prior to the emergence of the mass rebellions for independence.
Basing his findings on a wealth of archival detail and an astute reading of the patterns of social development, Childs portrays the episode less as a small, failed, if tragically and bloodily suppressed, conspiracy, and more as a widespread, complex and clearly popular phenomenon. Not only does he argue that the rebellion was a mixture of the spontaneous and the carefully planned (in its overall patterns and in its conscious spread) but spontaneous (in its emergence and its popularity), but also that the rebellion's supposed ‘leadership’, by José Antonio Aponte, was actually more a matter of subsequent mythology than reality. For, as Childs demonstrates well, the Spanish colonial authorities were the principal architects of that mythology; having suppressed the movement, their main concern was to punish widely (Childs records well the astonishing numbers of those executed), to restore order rapidly, and then to play down the rebellion's real significance. This they did, not least, by denominating it a less threatening ‘conspiracy’ (than the upheaval which it clearly was) and by attributing it to the baleful influence of one single radical.
The reason was all too clear: after the shock of the 1791 Saint-Domingue rebellion, the thought that such a widespread, popular movement might emerge in Cuba was simply too frightening to contemplate. To this effect, three separate constituencies in Cuba – the fearful whites, the restless slaves and the many free people of colour – needed to be persuaded that there was no serious threat to the colonial and social order. The former needed to be reassured in order to ensure social peace and criollo loyalty to a system that was evidently capable of preventing a Cuban Haiti, and the latter needed to be dissuaded from any desire to copy the Haitian example. The importance of persuading Cuba's black population to remain subservient was reinforced by the power of rumour at the time, as Childs shows well. He presents us with a picture of a Cuba awash with rumours of what had happened in Haiti, rumours from Spain (not least arising from the Cortes debates about slavery, which fearful Cuban criollos had always argued were dangerous to social peace in Cuba), rumours from Jamaica, all combining to create all manner of dangerous myths – about ‘naïve monarchism’, about supposedly imminent abolition decrees and about incidences of widespread revolt. The colonial authorities were of course ultimately successful: the rebellion was effectively written out of mainstream history.
The study sets all this in great detail. Within a cleverly fashioned structure (each chapter focusing on a separate aspect that is highlighted by a different one of the many executed ‘leaders’), Childs sets the rebellion well in its social and political context. Indeed, he explains successfully why the rebellion happened in a context that held all sorts of dangers at the time. The book starts with a revealing analysis of the complexity of black society in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Cuba, a society consisting of overlapping layers of hierarchy, of rights, of relative freedom and tolerance and of variable repression, a society in which two forces – the cabildos de nación and the black and mulato militias – provided invaluable spaces for the development of identity, confidence, political ideas and a tremendous range of patterns of life, thought and activity. The former played a critical role in preserving several different African identities and in creating pockets of relative freedom. The latter (until disbanded after Haiti) provided a platform for the development of black confidence, organisation and experience, as well as a growing sense of the historic and legal rights which militia service implied and which the authorities ultimately denied.
Out of this came the rebellion, whose scope and implications Childs recounts vividly, stressing its historic significance: for he argues, almost certainly correctly, that the rebellion – which included the demand for independence in its discourse – was the strongest factor in guaranteeing criollo loyalty to Spain, at precisely the moment when other criollos in the continent were contemplating separation. However, Childs also argues something else of importance: that, rather than seeing Cuba as an exception to the Spanish American norm – of an increasingly separatist criollo population, we should instead see the island's historical experience (in this respect) as following a different pattern, that of the wider slave-owning Caribbean. Indeed, within the latter context, the exception was Haiti and not Cuba; for elsewhere, the spectre of more or less simultaneous slave revolt (three such incidents are recounted briefly by Childs: in Jamaica, Virginia and Guiana) was sufficient to guarantee continued conservatism, loyalty and historical amnesia.
The overall impact of this study, therefore, is a welcome contribution to the debates about slave rebellion and also about the nature of the societies of both the slave-owning Caribbean islands and of the free people of colour. Its detail is always fascinating and telling, and its argument sound and much needed.
