Describing the dead

Published in New York in 1882—four years before the legal abolition of slavery in Cuba—Cecilia Valdés or El Angel Hill depicts, in key scenes, the remains of Pedro and Pablo Carabalí, two enslaved men who have committed suicide. Written by the criollo Cirilo Villaverde (Pinar del Río, 1812–New York, 1894) in exile and set in an earlier period, between 1812 and 1832, the novel unfolds as an antislavery narrative across sugar and coffee plantations and colonial Havana, portraying the incestuous relationship between the mulatta Cecilia and her half brother, the criollo Leonardo.Footnote ¹ Slavery appears not just as the economic foundation but as the organizing logic of social life itself, structuring relations, desires, and forms of perception.Footnote ² Criticized for reviving a “cursed epoch” (Morúa Delgado Reference Morúa Delgado1892, 27; Luis Reference Luis1990; Brioso Rieumont Reference Brioso Rieumont2025), the novel appeared when slavery was being destroyed through gradual emancipation, the wars for independence from Spain, and related political and economic factors (de la Fuente Reference Fuente2001). Villaverde nevertheless presented it as a historically grounded, realist novel, reflecting on an era already past and much debated. He insisted that precisely because slavery was ending, its violence should not be forgotten.Footnote ³ In his Autobiografía, he emphasizes the brutality of slave treatment—such as the branding of captives by traders like Pedro Blanco on the coast of Guinea—and laments how quickly these horrors were becoming unbelievable.Footnote ⁴ Yet Cecilia Valdés is more than an abolitionist text (Luis Reference Luis1988) or even a historical narrative (Benítez-Rojo Reference Benítez-Rojo1990);Footnote ⁵ it is also a novel that tests the limits of commodification by staging the material presence of enslaved bodies after death.Footnote ⁶

This article argues that the corpse in Cecilia Valdés marks a limit within the logic of slavery as commodification. Focusing on the scenes following the suicide of Pedro and Pablo Carabalí, I show how the novel exposes a breakdown of abstraction when the body can no longer circulate as value. To account for this tension, I develop two concepts: the remnant, which names matter that resists incorporation into regimes of equivalence, and the afterdeath, the interval in which the body persists beyond labor and property while remaining physically present. In this interval, the body represents financial loss, a reminder of suicide, and the limits of domination. Read through these concepts, the corpses in Villaverde’s novel reveal the point at which the commodity form falters: decomposition cannot be absorbed into abstraction, circulation, or insurance.

The two episodes at the center of this essay dramatize this failure. Rather than merely presenting slavery’s horrors, these scenes prolong the representation, inviting sustained reflection and interpretation. On the Gamboa family’s sugar plantation La Tinaja, Pedro’s corpse is dimly illuminated by a yellow wax candle, observed by Cándido Gamboa and other enslavers. Later, Pablo’s body is discovered hanging from a tree by the enslavers Leonardo Gamboa and Isabel Ilincheta. In both scenes, the narrator lingers over the body’s position and appearance, while the enslavers’ speech in the presence of the dead, attempts to manage, dismiss, or commodify the remains. Those who speak or remain silent are, significantly, among the novel’s main characters. What emerges is not simply death, but a crisis in the forms by which slavery tries to make bodies legible after death.

This crisis is inseparable from the paradox of the commodity’s death: Commodities do not die, but the humans reduced to them inevitably do. Slavery complicates capitalist social form because, unlike wage labor, it commodifies not labor-power but the entire person (Moreno Fraginals Reference Moreno Fraginals1978; Silva Reference Silva2022; Nesbitt Reference Nesbitt2022; Arnall Reference Arnall2025). The enslaved body is at once the commodity itself and the source of labor, a status that destabilizes the distinction between the symbolic, the juridical, the economic, and the ethical (Silva Reference Silva2022, 43–44). Drawing on Slavoj Žižek’s (Reference Žižek1989) reinterpretation of Marx, and on Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s account of abstraction, I approach the commodity through its form rather than through labor alone.Footnote ⁷ This perspective makes visible two intertwined processes: abstraction, through which the commodity becomes a legible unit of equivalence, and decomposition, through which the body returns as irreducible material remainder. The corpse of the formerly enslaved person thus confronts slavery with something it cannot resolve: matter that no longer produces value but cannot be fully made meaningless. Three interrelated questions arise: What happens to a commodity when it can no longer produce value—when it literally rots? How can the death of such a commodity be discussed by those who once claimed ownership? What does it mean to depict the dead in this framework?

This tension also helps clarify why the novel’s treatment of the dead differs from dominant approaches to slavery and hauntology.Footnote ⁸ Scholars have long shown that enslaved lives in the Atlantic world were subject to speculative regimes of insurance and credit, and that their continued existence on paper gave them a spectral life (Baucom Reference Baucom2005). In Cecilia Valdés, however, the dead are not only inscribed within those speculative circuits; they are also rendered as human remains in visible decay.Footnote ⁹ Against readings that privilege spectrality, this essay attends to the corpse as a material presence that resists abstraction. Exteriority here is no longer a sign of social death, nor a mechanism of subjection, but a condition imposed by death itself. Unlike living flesh, the corpse cannot labor, resist, or signify through interiority; it can only remain, decay, and be described.

The dead body therefore raises a further problem for abolitionist writing and literary representation alike. Much abolitionist literature relies on interiority—thought, feeling, moral reflection—to humanize the enslaved and mobilize antislavery sentiment (Ellis Reference Ellis1996; Carey Reference Carey2005; Aching Reference Aching2015; Peluffo Reference Peluffo2016). Scholarship has likewise emphasized enslaved agency, resistance, and everyday life (García Rodríguez, Reference García Rodríguez1996; Aidoo Reference Aidoo2018, Reference Aidoo2020; Pettway Reference Pettway2019; Price Reference Price2021; Goldgel Carballo Reference Goldgel Carballo2026). Exteriority, by contrast, has frequently been approached cautiously because of its role in reproducing the violence of slavery (Spillers Reference Spillers1987; Hartman Reference Hartman1997). Yet the corpse forces us out of that caution. Stripped of interiority and agency, it appears only through description, and its power lies precisely in that exposure. In Cecilia Valdés, the narrator’s sustained attention to the dead body confronts a speculative order in which enslaved people could be valued as insured cargo, property, or recoverable loss.Footnote ¹⁰ In colonial Cuba enslaved people were routinely insured against mortality, especially after the decline of the transatlantic slave trade. The corpse interrupts such logic by introducing decomposition, a final material trace that cannot be translated into equivalence.Footnote ¹¹ For commodification to occur, things must lose their materiality—the very property that allows for a chain of equivalences to be established. In this case, literality interrupts abstraction by continually directing attention back to bodily decay, which cannot be reduced to any system of equivalence. Consequently, the corpse becomes legible against the anxieties surrounding slave mortality, insurance, the concealment of suicide, and the managed disappearance of bodies.Footnote ¹² Between 1789 and 1867, approximately seven hundred thousand Africans were brought to Cuba (Murray Reference Murray2002, 298–326; Barcia Reference Barcia2017; Childs and Barcia Reference Childs, Barcia, Mark and Robert2012); many died in transit as a result of overcrowding, neglect, and the absence of oversight. Those who perished at sea were frequently treated as expendable cargo; captains disposed of their bodies to preserve the economic value of the remaining shipment and to evade British surveillance. These historical facts lie at the heart of the novel’s episodes.

With the theoretical stakes and the historical context now established, the article proceeds in four sections. The first examines an understudied episode that recalls the murder and disposal of enslaved Africans at sea, a brutal practice tied to the Middle Passage and to efforts to preserve economic value by eliminating evidence. The second turns to Pedro Carabalí’s corpse and the enslavers’ dialogue around it, showing how their speech attempts to deny mourning while failing to reduce the body to property and contain its value. The third analyzes insurance and slave mortality to show how postmortem valuation also structured colonial commerce. The fourth considers Pablo’s body and the reactions of the enslavers Leonardo and Isabel, whose refusal or inability to look fully reveals the limits of horror, abstraction, and control. Taken together, these scenes illuminate the point at which the dead enslaved body exceeds commodification through description. In Cecilia Valdés, the corpse is both the residue of slavery and the place where slavery’s logic comes undone.

Murder, commodification, and the disposal of bodies in Cecilia Valdés

In chapter 6, part 2, Cándido Gamboa’s ship, Veloz, is chased by the British and brought to the port of Havana. Gamboa recounts that the captain embarked five hundred Africans but arrived with only four hundred, implying that approximately one hundred lives were lost at sea. Some died during the crossing, but Gamboa clarifies to his wife, Rosa, that many were thrown overboard to avoid detection by the English. Once the ship anchors in Havana Bay—likely still under British watch—Gamboa devises a plan to disguise the surviving enslaved individuals by instructing his steward, Don Melitén Reventos, to collect four hundred striped shirts and heavy canvas trousers from Suárez Argudín’s secondhand shop. These clothes are meant to conceal the identities of the newly arrived captives—implying the existence of an intra-Caribbean trafficking network—allowing for their covert transfer. Gamboa’s final instructions to the steward, to deliver the clothes to the captain of the harbor boat Flor de Regla, who “has already been notified and knows where all that is to be taken,” suggest that this operation is both premeditated and systematic (Villaverde Reference Villaverde and Fischer2005, 173).

Although other episodes in the novel depict the workings of the illegal slave trade, when smuggling enslaved Africans became the primary source of wealth for families like the Gamboas (Moreno Fraginals Reference Moreno Fraginals1978), this scene dramatizes three interconnected processes of the Middle Passage: The murder of captives at sea, the commodification of the dead, and the disposal of bodies. In witnessing the murder, we also witness another form of brutality: The persistence of value even when bodies do not. Gamboa explicitly frames this logic, explaining that sacrificing captives preserves the value of the remaining human “cargo,” revealing how the dead are absorbed into the economy. The principle is clear: The logic of losing many to save some. When he instructs Reventos, he says, “If we don’t save many, we’ll save some.” Unaware that the Veloz has arrived and still thinking that Cándido is speaking of trousers, Reventos asks, “Somewhat?” Cándido responds, “Bundles, man, bundles (…) Don’t you know that the Veloz has come in?” (174). Here, bundles refers to human captives, while Reventos initially thinks of trousers, highlighting the collapse between human life and commercial goods. The treatment of the dead as part of the same economic system as the living is reinforced when Gamboa uses the term bundle to describe both living captives and corpses. He notes that the captain “threw two-thirds of the bundles overboard” and tells Rosa, “Enough of your belief that bundles from Africa have a soul and are angels” (173). He also comments that “a number of them have died and had to be thrown overboard … lots of them, fortunately the dregs of the lot, in a word” (173). The original Spanish reads, “se le han muerto algunos y tenido que echar al agua… muchos, vamos, la broza por fortuna” (240). Here, the term broza, translated as “dregs,” underscores commodification and reinforces the treatment of bodies as disposable remnants within this system.

It is never made clear to the reader how many captives were killed or how many died in transit. By withholding these details, Cándido ensures that the deaths can be classified as “natural causes” and thus remain insurable. He reports only general numbers—five hundred departed, four hundred arrived—and even contradicts himself, first saying that some, then that many, then “two-thirds,” nearly the entire cargo, were thrown overboard. The reader is unable to count. Furthermore, the novel depicts the bodies disappearing so rapidly that the scale of lives lost goes unnoticed. It does not linger on the disturbance of the water or “the wake” of the dead, as Christina Sharpe (Reference Sharpe2016, 3) might call it; murder is concealed, and bodies, uncounted and undescribed, vanish almost immediately.

This scene of disposal reenacts a central logic of commodification: the reduction of bodies to abstract units of value and the disregard of their materiality. As Vincent Brown (Reference Brown2010) and others have shown, commodification involves the “designation of mere product labels … a discourse of exchange that seeks equivalences between units, flattening the social world by rendering it in the abstract” (28). In markets, commodification required moments of deliberate inattention to the physical body, although this was not the case in daily life (Borrego Moreno Reference Borrego Moreno2019). However, here, abstraction reaches its most brutal expression: Death itself becomes a tool of capital. Human remains are absorbed into the economy so completely that, in this calculus, the body is entirely erased. In Hartman’s (Reference Hartman2007) terms, this is the “afterlife of slavery”—what I define here as the persistence of value after the body has disappeared. Murder and physical disappearance are required for profit.

I contrast this logic with what I call afterdeath: the passages in which the bodies of Pedro and Pablo Carabalí remain in plain sight for an extended period. Placing these episodes side by side reveals a narrative shift: From the silent, quantitative erasure of the dead to a prolonged, visual focus on decaying corpses that exposes the limits of capital. This juxtaposition forms the novel’s meditation on the “remnants of slavery”: it moves from the murder and disposal of captives in service of profit to suicide and the lingering presence of bodies that resist valuation. In the later scenes the bodies’ value is lost because it cannot be recovered, critiquing the process Villaverde depicts in the Veloz episode. While scholarship often treats the enslaved’s suicides as acts of resistance, my analysis foregrounds the resistance inherent in the very presence of their remains.

Speaking before Carabalí’s corpse

In chapter 7, part 3, of Cecilia Valdés, the enslaved Pedro Carabalí commits suicide, swallowing his own tongue. Rather than concluding the narrative, Villaverde prolongs the scene, placing Carabalí’s corpse at the center. The body is examined by Cándido Gamboa, the priest, Captain Peña, and Dr. Montes de Oca; later the enslaved María de Regla and a Galician steward appear. The early phase of the scene is thus organized around the responses of the enslavers who attempt to contain Carabalí’s “value.” What unfolds is not a meditation on suicide but a discourse organized around the body itself. Stripped of humanity in life, Carabalí’s remains cannot be coherently addressed. Funerary ritual is displaced by calculation, diagnosis, and control; the body is exposed, examined, and spoken about, yet it is never commemorated. Read alongside Loraux’s (Reference Loraux2012) tradition of the funerary oration and Arroyo’s (Reference Arroyo2018) studies of the velorio, the episode does not fit either form.

The passage exposes the stakes for enslavers when confronted with the remains of a commodity that, by definition, should not “die.” It introduces a perplexing genre—neither funerary oration nor wake—but an attempt to narrate the death of a thing, which was never supposed to possess a human life. This raises a fundamental problem: How can enslavers account for the death of something that, in their logic, never existed as a life to lose? The men gathered around Carabalí’s corpse confront this paradox directly.

One might assume that enslavers clearly distinguished between flesh that could be commodified and that which could not. To suggest otherwise would imply that the planters and businessmen depicted in the novel lacked a basic understanding of the economy they sustained—an implausible claim, especially when literary critics are tasked with reconstructing nineteenth-century market logics. One could also argue that the commodity status of the enslaved person ended at death. Villaverde’s scene, however, suggests something more unstable. The men surrounding Carabalí’s corpse attempt to continue reading the body as a commodity while simultaneously revealing the impossibility of fully doing so. Their discourse collapses; nothing fully coheres.

After attempting to escape (a case of cimarronaje), Carabalí is hunted down, mauled by dogs, and punished; he ultimately takes his life by swallowing his own tongue. Scholars such as Julio Ramos (Reference Ramos1993) have interpreted this suicide as a political and linguistic act of final defiance (Ramos Reference Ramos1993; Azougarh Reference Azougarh2006). This reading, however, overlooks the novel’s shift from the act of suicide to the afterdeath, dwelling on the corpse and the reactions it provokes. Carabalí lies before this group in the infirmary, which the narrator describes in vivid detail:

The sight of it was horrifying, with rigor mortis having already set in. Lying on his back on the sleeping platform, his death bed, the dead man was still clutching the edges of it with his clenched fingers. As a result of the dog bites, his arms, legs, and raised chest were swollen; his bloodshot eyes were protruding almost out of their sockets, and his tattered garments were spattered with blood….

Cándido Gamboa (owner of La Tinaja), Captain Peña, and the priest represent, respectively, commerce, repressive force, and organized religion—the three institutions sustaining colonial Cuba. Each of them attempts to contain Carabalí’s value per the authority and limits of their respective roles. Cándido views Carabalí’s death as the “loss” of a valuable worker, referring to him as “gold”; the priest laments not arriving in time to obtain a confession; and the captain expresses annoyance at being unable to punish Carabalí for his perceived arrogance, which led to an uprising at the sugar mill. Despite their efforts, the corpse resists each man’s attempts to impose meaning, as they all arrive too late and prove inefficient before the body. The priest’s failure to intervene exposes the limits of religious authority: He cannot offer spiritual guidance, restore order, or reclaim moral authority. This is especially noticeable given the wider historical context of the novel. As scholars have shown, the church played a covertly coercive role at sugar mills, where chaplains used texts like Explicación de la doctrina cristiana acomodada a la capacidad de los negros bozales (1818) to instruct and gain the trust of enslaved people in order to control them (Camacho Reference Camacho2024). Yet that complicity is suspended here. Similarly, Captain Peña can only lament before the body, powerless to punish.

It is only the doctor’s perspective that highlights, once and for all, the material reality of this body—and in a way that fails to serve commercial interests. Earlier in this scene, Dr. Tomás Montes de Oca, a prominent physician in Havana, is called to determine the cause of death. Doctors often colluded with plantation owners to conceal signs of mistreatment (Chávez-Rivera Reference Chávez-Rivera2016, 232), in part because slave insurance policies did not cover sevicia—death resulting from excessive cruelty—or death by suicide (Pérez Reference Pérez2005; Varella Reference Varella2018).Footnote ¹³ Yet here, Montes de Oca emphasizes the brutality of Carabalí’s death, offering a vivid account of Carabalí’s asphyxiation, describing it as “worse than strangling on the gallows” (359). In this case, Villaverde makes the decision to have the doctor not align with Cándido’s interests, perhaps as one strategy of many to prioritize the material body’s reality.

The corpse embodies an incongruence, for it is both the remains of a person who has asserted agency through suicide and a loss counted in economic, political, and religious terms. In the corpse, the part and the whole can no longer be made fully to align (Agamben Reference Agamben and Heller-Roazen1999); it is not only the part it occupied within the slave economy but also the life that this economy refused to acknowledge. As a result, everything that unfolds around the body becomes unfit: the enslavers’ reactions exceed their respective logics.

The characters speak and, “without realizing it,” “group themselves around the corpse” (360)—a gesture that signals their perplexity as well as the curiosity drawing them to the scene. Earlier, Cándido cannot comprehend how Pedro died by swallowing his own tongue: “I have never in my life heard anything like that,” he says, asking to be taken to the infirmary to see the body (358–359). Then, even after Montes de Oca determines the cause of death, the men linger before the corpse, discussing what happened and even calling a witness—the enslaved María de Regla, Carabalí’s nurse—to give her account. Why linger once the commodity is dead, the cause is clear, Carabalí’s suicide is meant to defy them and cannot be concealed? This is also a moment of compulsion before the body.

Behind the attempts to commodify the enslaved lie palpable reactions: fear of enslaved people, desires for them, attempts to master and outsmart them. This fixation stems from the sense of powerlessness triggered by the defiance inherent in Carabalí’s suicide—one of the only acts through which enslaved people could assert control over their bodies while causing economic loss to their masters (Sánchez Cobos Reference Sánchez Cobos2019; Calhoun Reference Calhoun2024).Footnote ¹⁴ This final act of defiance is precisely what Carabalí deliberately calls Cándido to witness in the infirmary. The men lament having arrived too late to have intervened before Carabalí took his life. Reckoning with Carabalí’s own power and courage, they explicitly refer to the dead man’s “pride” and his “soul”—a comment tied directly to his suicide. The corpse is a reminder of the enslaved person’s capacity to interrupt their commodity status.

However, once they are before the corpse itself, the characters do not describe the body despite it being right in front of them. By avoiding it, they reveal their inability to fully account for the remains in the terms available to each of them. They confront a body that is both a former commodity and the remains of someone who exercised agency.

The discourse of this scene presents a stark difference from the traditions of the funeral oration and the velorio, revealing a perversion of what ought to honor a human life, offering a rewriting of these models. As Nicole Loraux (Reference Loraux2012) shows, Pericles and Thucydides understood the funeral oration as a model for constructing democracy in classical Athens because it was the highest form of funeral praise even for the lost lives of lower-status citizens.Footnote ¹⁵ According to Thucydides, public funerals were reserved for those who died in war: The bones were displayed for three days, then ceremonially carried to the public cemetery, where a man chosen by all delivered the funeral oration (38–39). Carabalí’s scene recalls the funeral oration because there are words spoken before a corpse. However, here, there is no honoring of the dead. It is not a funerary oration because the words are spoken while the body is still exposed, rather than after it has ceremonially been buried, and none of the speakers refers to the remains, stripping the corpse of significance. Cándido discusses the suicide in financial terms but does not discuss the remains themselves because he cannot incorporate them into economic logic. Yet in this scene, unlike Isabel Ilincheta in a later scene, the men do not remain silent; they all try to find ways to account for what has happened, but without showing signs of either horror for the brutal death or honor for Carabalí’s courage.

The scene also evokes and strategically distorts a velatorio or velorio, a practice culturally and historically closer to the context of the novel in Spanish Cuba, in which people gather around a deceased person in the hours after their death (Arroyo Reference Arroyo2018; Arroyo Reference Arroyo2023, 108–120). The characters speak and gather around the corpse, and the corpse is illuminated by a single wax candle, a detail that seems to reference this practice, yet the scene is stripped of its commemorative and communal function. It is not fully a wake, for although the characters gather around the body, they are not accompanying Carabalí’s remains and are not mourning him.

The question here is, What happens when one speaks in the presence of someone who is not a free person—someone for whom no formal funeral exists? The distinction between dignity and price is relevant here. As Kant (Reference Kant2003, 48) writes, “En el reino de los fines todo tiene un precio o una dignidad. Aquello que tiene precio puede ser sustituido por algo equivalente; en cambio, lo que se halla por encima de todo precio y, por tanto, no admite nada equivalente, eso tiene una dignidad.” Accordingly, dignity might persist even in death, standing apart from economic value. One might interpret that the enslavers, by avoiding a discussion of the remains, attempt to strip the corpse of its dignity—precisely because, following Kant, dignity is a form of value that cannot be appropriated. Unlike Athenian warriors, honored for their valor, the novel shows that when a commodified person dies, that person’s body is not honored by the enslavers, even when the enslavers discuss the person’s death. And yet the characters unknowingly gather around the body, showing that the manner of death has left an impression on them that they cannot avoid.

Thus the passage asks whether a body that was once a commodity can be given political meaning that transcends the interpretations of its former owners. The narrator’s description of Carabalí’s corpse—unmediated by the enslavers’ dialogue—offers a counter-voice that restores material presence to a corpse otherwise abstracted by commerce and insurance. In this way, the scene presents a literary mode of funerary honor that operates alongside, and in opposition to, the market-driven dehumanization pervasive throughout the novel.

The remnants of slavery

The tension between the enslaved asserting agency through suicide, the system’s capacity to absorb economic losses, and the depiction of remains that cannot be insured lies at the heart of this scene. Throughout early-nineteenth-century Cuba, the recurring suicides of enslaved Africans generated anxieties among traders, planters, and colonial officials. As slave mortality rose and the illegal slave trade became unsustainable, enslavers developed financial mechanisms to manage risks, giving rise to insurance companies’ anticipation of potential deaths (Barcia Reference Barcia2017). Therefore, enslavers did not always regard suicide as a financial loss (Barcia Reference Barcia2017; Camacho Reference Camacho2023, 69).Footnote ¹⁶ In many cases, planters would claim that an enslaved individual died of natural causes even if they had committed suicide, precisely to secure compensation that would otherwise be denied for the actual cause of death (Borrego Moreno Reference Borrego Moreno2019).

A parallel logic operated in the Zong massacre of 1781. Ian Baucom (Reference Baucom2005) shows that shipowners had insured the enslaved as cargo. Although the policy did not cover losses due to poor navigation or mismanagement, it did cover losses due to death from “natural causes.” In this way, owners could claim compensation for those thrown overboard, the living and the dead. Villaverde’s scene of the Veloz suggests a similar scheme. Although the novel does not state this explicitly, we can infer that Gamboa had insured the human “cargo,” and that bodies were disposed of as “natural deaths” to avoid capture, with the knowledge that their value could be recovered through insurance.

Fernando Ortiz (Reference Ortiz1975, 276) explains how, when illegal trafficking was infeasible and smuggling became increasingly difficult in Cuba, enslavers could purchase “mutual insurance against the death of the slave”:

Ortiz describes how, through insurance, landowners and merchants sought to recuperate as much as possible, even after the death of their valued “property.” Baucom (Reference Baucom2005) similarly illustrates how insurance in the eighteenth century provided British speculators with a new industry to invest in beyond traditional accounting procedures focused on credit transactions. Insurance transformed the value of enslaved people’s bodies from being merely manufactured and exchanged through credit transactions to also being insured in anticipation of their potential destruction (Baucom Reference Baucom2005, 47). Previously, credit had already separated value expression from the existence of physical objects, emphasizing that value was not inherent in things but was rather a product of imagination and interpretation (Baucom Reference Baucom2005, 16-17).Footnote ¹⁸ However, insurance took this a step further. It addressed the fundamental challenge faced by traffickers, merchants, landowners, and investors: that imagined value ceased to exist in a commodity-centric culture once the commodity died. Insurance resolved this by allowing value to persist beyond the physical existence of an object. Baucom explained how insurance nullifies an object, detaches it from being the sole bearer of value while simultaneously freeing value from the degradation associated with physical existence.Footnote ¹⁹

In this context, insurance is a way of conferring value on lost things—that is, the bodies of the enslaved who are murdered to preserve the rest of the cargo. If insurance operates prophetically and occupies the afterlife (as evidenced by one of Havana’s insurance companies, precisely named La Providencia, or Providence, as mentioned by Ortiz), then the scenes of Pedro and Pablo Carabalí in Cecilia Valdés withdraw value just before the corpses disappear, dwelling in the afterdeath—that is, the moments before the corpse disappears from sight. The novel portrays how enslavers, including Cándido Gamboa and later Leonardo Gamboa, attempt to narrate the death of Pedro and Pablo. However, their efforts ultimately fail, as illustrated in Carabalí’s scene: Enslavers cannot reduce these bodies to abstraction.

At the same time—and here lies the significant twist of Cecilia Valdés—the narrator’s description of the corpses in these same scenes sharply contrasts with the dialogues that reveal how merchants, traffickers, and insurers perceive these bodies. Similar to how funeral prayers attempt to recover and honor the lost spirituality of the corpse (Loraux Reference Loraux2012), these descriptions of the dead bodies seek to reclaim and to honor their presence—but in this case, specifically, their physicality. They restore the materiality that insurance had preemptively abstracted. The novel suggests that one way to hint at humanity, in addition to the salvation of the soul (the claim that the enslaved had souls was important in the framework of abolitionist campaigns), is through materiality. This is a different way of thinking about the materiality that Saidiya Hartman (Reference Hartman1997) recenters in her “scenes of subjection.” Although Hartman’s purpose is to denounce the violence in abolitionist literary scenes, she also recuperates the enslaved’s materiality in her analysis, clarifying that it is their bodies that are subjected and not only their souls.

Therefore, the scenes of these corpses illuminate another form of materiality: lost materiality. Baucom’s insurance analysis suggests that while insurance can cover the disappearance of an object, it has no hold on its full physical presence. Insurance may bestow value on lost lives, but this does not imply the decomposition of the bodies. In these scenes, the novel’s focus is not on the specter but on the residual matter in the afterdeath, prior to “destruction.” They thematize material disappearance within the framework of trafficking—a concept that the novel dramatizes through the earlier image of the bodies that were discarded from the ship. Simultaneously, they resurrect this dead materiality, as represented by these corpses, and place it at the forefront. Further, unlike in the distortions in insurance claims, these scenes do not conceal the cause of death, and characters cannot feign ignorance of suicide. All of this directly challenges the logic of this system.

The corpse as visual excess

In chapter 7, part 3, Leonardo Gamboa and his fiancée Isabel Ilincheta encounter the hanging body of Pablo Carabalí during an excursion near La Tinaja sugar mill. The presence of Pablo’s corpse resists Leonardo’s and Isabel’s attempts to feign ignorance or to render the remains as goods. This resistance takes shape through a breakdown between discourse and visuality. What is visible exceeds what can be spoken. Leonardo’s and Isabel’s reactions circle the corpse without addressing it directly: Isabel remains silent out of horror and inexpressibility, while Leonardo resorts to a language of commerce. Yet they fail to contain the visual excess of the body—its decomposition. At the same time, the narrator’s descriptions emphasize the physical decay of Pablo’s corpse. This makes it impossible for Leonardo and Isabel to use simile as simulation, to view the remains as goods, and to conceal the suicide. The horrified refusal to look at the corpse makes the reader face the human aspect of the body through the enslavers’ own horror—while also forcing the reader to recognize that the reaction of horror is not the same as an emotion of compassion that would account for the fullness of the deceased’s humanity.

Mirroring the captains of illegal slave ships who disguised human cargo as legal goods—a farce sustained by complicit witnesses and colonial authorities—Cecilia Valdés depicts a world predicated on simulation: The feigned ignorance of slavery’s brutalities and practices, upheld by many characters and, at times, by a presumably white narrator (Sommer Reference Sommer1994). While scholars have applied simulation to the sustenance of Cuba’s illicit slave trade (Goldgel Carballo Reference Goldgel Carballo2019), here simulation constitutes an economic logic central to slavery itself—a logic of concealment, substitution, and equivalence.Footnote ²⁰ From a Marxist’s viewpoint, simulation can be understood as the creation of a commercial relationship with the enslaved as commodities. In Marxist theory, where exchange value precedes use value, objects assume a simulated, second nature. Within the commodity form (Žižek Reference Žižek1989), nothing truly is but appears to be; the object’s main characteristic being its value.

In this context, the narrator’s literal descriptions interrupt the simulation embedded in the commodity form. The literal stands in opposition to simulation, because it cannot be made equivalent to anything else, becoming the final index of reality in a world otherwise governed—until the event of the suicide—by the simulation inherent in the commodity.

Leonardo Gamboa and Isabel Ilincheta (his fiancée and Cecilia’s rival) stumble upon the corpse of Pablo near La Tinaja sugar mill. Here, Villaverde explores the horror associated with the exterior of the body. The overwhelming presence of the corpse prevents Leonardo and Isabel from using similes to mask horror and to ignore the suicide.

Villaverde uses the simile—a conventional literary device—to stage the simulation, preparing the reader for its disruption. Because a simile holds two meanings at once, speakers don’t have to choose between them. Often, this tactic works: The narrator describes the yellow bunches of a banana plantation touching the ground “like thin sheets of steel” (364), evoking plantation blades but without directly naming them. The sea appears “apparently calm,” although it is the same Atlantic that carries enslaved Africans across the Middle Passage. Earlier in the scene, a similar duality is evident when Isabel describes a pool as both “gloomy” and “inviting to bathe” (363). This coexistence of horror and the idyllic defines the logic of the passage and Isabel’s perception: Standing before the puddle, she still wants to swim. It reveals to the reader the duality of her world—decay and beauty, violence and innocence. But with Pablo’s corpse, that illusion collapses. In that moment, the novel briefly suspends simulation and reveals instead the limits of language and the impossibility of cloaking horror. If we follow Jean Baudrillard’s (Reference Baudrillard and Rovira1978) theory, the corpse functions as a “hyperreal index”—a sign detached from a symbolic order, asserting a literal presence that resists the novel’s symbolic and speculative renderings.Footnote ²¹

The narrator tells how Isabel and Leonardo encounter an odor reminiscent of a decaying body: “They began to smell a strong stench, like that of a dead body: and immediately thereafter they discovered a vast gathering of turkey buzzards, bending the branches of the trees with their weight so that they serve as triumphal arches, so to speak, along the path” (Villaverde Reference Villaverde and Fischer2005, 365). Here, the narrator once again introduces the simile, which hinges on the balance between the horrific and idyllic. But the illusion of this simile—and of Isabel’s initial perception of freedom—is shattered by the presence of Pablo’s actual corpse.

Isabel, who once believed she could “rule as she pleased over the countryside from her saddle, would breathe purer and freer air, and would widen the horizons of her existence” (363), finds her air saturated by the stench of the swinging corpse. The odor permeates everything; no one escapes it. As the stench materializes as an actual dead body, Pablo’s corpse interrupts the potential for simulation. Instead, it reduces reality to a single possibility: Literality. The narrator proceeds with a description of Pablo’s corpse:

Isabel’s romanticized vision of the countryside is shattered by the stench of Pablo’s corpse. But while this corpse lies in front of Leonardo and Isabel, the characters nevertheless remain silent. The scene establishes a notable contrast between these characters’ intensified observations and their muted expressions.

It is important to explain that horror does not equal compassion here. It might look like Isabel’s “deathly pale” fear is an emotional response to the gravity and human meaning of the suicide, but that’s not necessarily the case. While it is not exactly indifference here, this horror is one that is ultimately very depersonalized and gets stopped short before further human connection, curiosity, and compassion. I say this to clarify that I am not reading this as “indifference”—but as horror of a very depersonalized kind.

The response to the corpse becomes pointed when compared to an earlier moment in the scene in which Leonardo recounts the death of a dog. Although he never saw the dog, Leonardo tells of the dog’s death with emotion, assigning meaning through narration: “Papa lost a setter that he was very fond of in this very pool” (364). But when he encounters Pablo’s corpse, he remains silent. In this context, narration serves as an act that imparts a certain weight to the object being narrated, an act of valuation: By recounting the dog’s death, Leonardo assigns importance to it. What is narrated is made visible and significant; what is ignored remains invisible and ungrievable. Conversely, the act of looking without speaking diminishes the recognition of an object. When Leonardo says, “¡Mira!,” he also points to the hanging corpse, which indicates recognition, yet he merely presents it to Isabel as if it were a curiosity. It is important to remember that they are on an excursion, and Villaverde chooses the term look (mirar) instead of see (ver). The act of looking evokes the gaze that one might cast upon a landscape—they are, after all, on an excursion—whereas seeing implies a deeper level of recognition and more focused attention. The possibility of specifically “seeing” the corpse is effectively nullified by the invitation to “look” at the scene. Here, the fractured economy within the sensory regime carries the political distinction between seeing and looking at.

The reader confronts a corpse that is observed but not explicitly acknowledged by the enslavers’ dialogue. If Isabel remains silent through depersonalized horror, then Leonardo perceives the corpse solely through its appearance. Here, I distinguish the terms appearance and exteriority. I understand appearance as how something is merely perceived, subject to a deceptive quality that masks underlying meanings. As we saw earlier, the sea is “apparently calm.” By contrast, exteriority refers in the novel to immediate materiality, particularly in the case of a corpse, and is aligned with the essence of what it actually is: A material body. Understanding this distinction illuminates how the scene presents exteriority and appearance differently. Appearance serves to explore the complexities of perception (and simulation) within the context of the illegal slave trade (let’s not forget that Cándido instructs his steward to disguise the cargo). Leonardo gazes at the body but sees only “a dreadful corpse about which he was about to stumble.” In short, he views it as an obstacle, devoid of any internal significance. Unable to dismiss it, Leonardo attempts to describe it as an object he stumbles upon along the path, something akin to a “bundle,” even though he does not use the word “bundle” itself. However, the exteriority of the corpse—its immediate materiality—interrupts this interpretation of its appearance. On the exterior of a corpse, there is no distinction between essence and exterior; they are equalized by the concrete character imparted by literality. Thus, in this very scene, Pablo’s shocking, unexpected exterior prevents Leonardo from ignoring his body. Leonardo looks at the distorted surface to evade confronting the man’s body, but it is his shock at the reality of such exterior that rekindles the humanization of this body.

The contrast between Isabel’s initial boldness on her journey and her reaction when first seeing Pablo’s corpse is also worth noting. When passing by a pool, Isabel asks, “How deep?” Leonardo replies, “It’s over a man’s head.” She then responds, “Then it’s easy enough to swim in” (Villaverde Reference Villaverde and Fischer2005, 364). She displays confidence and fearlessness, boldly declaring at the grove’s entrance, “Who said anything about fear? Onward. Let it never be said that where a man on a horseback passed, Isabel was left behind” (365), accompanied by “a sparkle to her eyes, and a smile to her lips” (365). However, her demeanor changes dramatically when confronted with Pablo’s decomposed body, which Leonardo points out to her, saying, “‘Look!’ ‘Ay, Leonardo!’ she exclaimed in horror” (366), the narrator notes. Isabel “turned deadly pale and was unable to speak, and would have lost her senses as well and fallen from the saddle to the ground, if Leonardo … had not … grabbed her by the hand, given her the most affectionate dictates, offered her a thousand pardons, and brought her out into the open” (366). Isabel’s response—turning deadly pale and falling silent—even though it is full of feeling (of a certain kind), must not be mistaken for a feeling of compassion. In fact, it is just the opposite: Horror that reacts to the surface of the body alone.

Isabel’s response here complicates the notion of Isabel’s beneficence. Critics have characterized Isabel as “compassionate” and “correct,” often likening her to Villaverde’s wife, Emilia Casanova (Sommer Reference Sommer1993, 127).Footnote ²² The narrator and later other characters describe the impact on Isabel of Pablo’s body. They notice how disturbed she appears. But her behavior is incongruous. Despite Isabel’s reaction, she does not question the circumstances of Pablo’s death. This is a significant departure from the compassionate portrayal usually attributed to her, particularly seen in her efforts to protect enslaved individuals on her coffee plantation. In this case, however, Isabel stands mute before the dead body. Her reaction underscores her repulsion at the sight of the decomposed body over any compassion for Pablo.

The narrative underscores Isabel’s incongruous responses by preparing the reader for her reaction through a long journey across the Cuban countryside, marked by its topography of coffee and sugar plantations. Throughout this journey, Isabel serves as a key narrative focal point—her thoughts on the landscape, her caring for a horse unable to carry its load, and her moments of identification with the suffering of the enslaved—all build a sense of introspection and compassion. These instances, therefore, stand in contrast with her later silence upon encountering Pablo’s decomposing body, which complicates her compassion.

Nevertheless, Isabel’s horrified reaction is still different from that of characters like Cándido Gamboa, who openly discuss suicide without displaying horror at all in the presence of Carabalí’s corpse. Horrified, Isabel is confronted with the limits of language—and perhaps of comprehension itself. For her, the experience verges on the unspeakable and the incomprehensible. But it also stops short of further curiosity, concern, or anything approaching a funerary honoring of the dead. Her horror at the corpse stands in place of compassion. Isabel neither asks about Pablo’s identity nor mentions it later—despite her initial reaction to the corpse.

The narrator reveals Pablo’s identity only after Isabel has left. The narrator states, “As Leonardo sent Caimán the watchman to the wood to identify, if possible, the black man who had hanged himself” (366), and later, “it was determined that the dead man was Pablo.” But Isabel has left the scene. Her response to Pablo’s corpse reveals a different facet of Isabel—one that reacts strongly to the visual horror rather than engaging with the individual who has died. It is an emotion felt within but not extended outward toward the other. I am not suggesting that Isabel feels no compassion for Pablo, but this scene overshadows it, foregrounding instead Isabel’s depersonalized and inward reaction to the horror of the dead body. What dominates her reaction is repulsion and fear, in contrast to the earlier boldness with which she gazed upon the landscape outside of herself. That landscape showed her capacity to be more outward oriented, in contrast to what we find here in this moment. The question, then, becomes whether horror can be narrated. Exploring whether horror exceeds what can be fully expressed through words, Julia Kristeva (Reference Kristeva2024) explains: For the person who confronts the abject, it lies beyond what can be thought. Horror at abjection was a common trope in nineteenth-century realist and naturalist fiction. In this case, however, this explanation of the un-narratability of horror is problematic because it does not account for Isabel’s refusal to confer significance on the individual’s death. In this case, it is refusal rather than inability to conceive of the horrific. Villaverde’s scene separates the event of death and its personal significance from the horror of the body’s exterior. Following Kristeva, the abject does not bring recognition of the individual because it disrupts identity and language and produces a form of horror that resists narration—horror that exists primarily in relation to abjection. But departing from Kristeva, there is also the sense in Villaverde that speech in recognition of this corpse’s individual humanity is possible but withheld.

It is important to distinguish Isabel from Leonardo, as the two characters respond differently to the horror they witness. Leonardo’s response reveals an attempt to abstract, to ignore, and to deny that is thwarted by the shock of the corpse’s material presence. Leonardo cannot feign ignorance because Pablo’s corpse has unexpectedly appeared in the middle of the way. He gazes at it but dismisses what he sees, treating the corpse as an obstacle. Treating the corpse as something akin to a “bundle” enables him to ignore its significance beyond economic logic. In this type of commercial-political regime, all forms of meaning are dominated by commodification. Consequently, the characters in the novel attempt to attribute meaning to Pablo’s corpse within the illusion of it being just another commodity, thus facilitating their ability to disregard it. For this reason, when characters such as Leonardo encounter corpses, they observe them but refrain from discussing them. In continuation of Cándido Gamboa’s avoidance of the body when discussing Pedro Carabalí’s death, Pablo’s corpse remains an unsettling visual excess and points to the failures of enslaver characters like Leonardo to discuss this reality.

Immediately after the scene in which Leonardo and Isabel encounter Pablo’s corpse, the characters observe the transportation of Pedro Carabalí’s corpse to the plantation cemetery. This scene includes detailed description of the cemetery for the enslaved who died at La Tinaja, the dead body, and its parallel with the goods being carried. Scholarship notes that, under Bishop Espada’s prohibitions, enslaved people who committed suicide were denied burial in sacred ground—even when baptized (Chávez-Rivera Reference Chávez-Rivera2016, 232; Marqués de Armas Reference Marqués de Armas2015). This context may explain why the cemetery is unrecognizable in the novel: The narrator describes it as “an ordinary sized enclosure” with a crude gate and cross, but with no markers, tombstones, or visible graves, only “luxuriant grass” (367).

The riders see three Black men approaching, carrying an “object” Leonardo cannot immediately decipher. The narrator notes, “from a distance … it is not easy to discern … the object of the procession or the nature of the load that was being transported” (367). What is visible is the means of transportation, “two objects that looked like cylinders,” resembling banana-tree trunks tied to “the usual vehicle for carrying goods”—the mule (367). Because Leonardo cannot see the corpse, he interprets it through the language of commerce. He believes it is goods that are being transported across the plantation. The corpse has been handled and narrated as if it were plantation freight. Later, there comes the moment of recognition: Leonardo sees the human remains. Only when he connects the men to the burial ground does “the entire mystery vanishes”: He realizes the “load” is Pedro Carabalí’s body (367). He attempts to position himself on Isabel’s right to hide the corpse from her, but the narrator emphasizes the futility of this effort: Leonardo cannot shield the human remains, and the women ultimately see the corpse. Once again, the corpse interrupts the illusion of commerce and the power to deny, ignore, or conceal.

Therefore, a tension emerges between the “narrative” and the “description” of these bodies. Within the narrative, the corpse stands as a visual excess that does not gain depth through narration; it remains akin to a “bundle.” Paradoxically, the novel confers great significance on these corpses through the narrator’s descriptions. These descriptions emphasize the contrasting actions of enslavers who adamantly refuse to engage in meaningful discourses on corpses.

It is important to clarify that this phenomenon serves as a visual excess for characters and operates as an ekphrasis for readers. This difference underscores the dual impact of breaking with abstraction, affecting both the novel’s commodity economy and the narrative universe. The characters grapple with a tangible corpse that, by resisting abstraction, exceeds commodification. This resistance is not by means of interiority but by means of the exterior. When readers grapple with these descriptions, they confront the reality of the deceased person—precisely what the enslaver characters repeatedly refuse to do within the plot.