In the summer of 1835, rumors of insurgency rattled Havana. In the midst of what might have been a scuffle that involved a group of about 30 people—enslaved, emancipados (recaptured Africans) and freed individuals of color identified as Lucumí—some were overheard shouting, “Kill white, Havana mine!”

Tempers were running high on an island caught between unprecedented sugar wealth and surging abolitionist pressures from neighboring Haiti and Jamaica. The authorities and the planter class saw conspiracy at every turn, even in the exchanges of a heated argument. The Lucumís were apparently special targets of their fear. Since the late eighteenth century, with the collapse of the Ọ̀yọ́ Empire, the number of Yorùbá-speakers (collectively known as Lucumís) brought to work on Cuba's plantations had been increasing; so did the planters’ presumption of the antagonism of their communities. In fact, two years before the 1835 incident, the authorities had accused over 300 enslaved people identified as Lucumís of revolting on a coffee plantation 20 miles west of Havana. The event came to be known as the Lucumí War. In 1835, without evidence, the authorities pointed to Juan Nepomuceno Prieto, leader of one of the Lucumí cabildos in Havana, as a suspect organizer of this new, smaller center of unrest.

Henry Lovejoy takes the 1835 incident and ensuing trial as starting point for a moving biography of Juan Nepomuceno Prieto, providing through it an account of Yorùbá speakers’ religious and social life in nineteenth-century Havana. In a geographically sweeping account, the author takes us from the port of Badagry in the Bight of Benin in the 1780s to 1830s Cuba. The protagonist had been captured as a child, was most likely taken to Jamaica first and then to Havana around the mid 1780s, then freed himself and married. Prieto became a member of the militias of color at some point between 1795 and 1818, a capacity in which he helped repress the 1812 Aponte conspiracy against slavery and was deployed to protect Spanish territories in Florida. Upon his return, he and his wife assumed leadership roles in the Lucumí cabildo. The story that transpires in the pages of this book will draw in an English-speaking readership with an interest in the Yorùbá-speaking diaspora in Cuba and the Atlantic World.

Associated with religious practices known as Santería, the Lucumís have been the object of a rich historiography in Cuba, as Lovejoy himself points out. This monograph adds the individual biography of a leading, yet little-known figure to this corpus, while also showcasing a methodology for unearthing a silenced history. Lovejoy draws primarily on the judicial case in which Prieto stood accused of sedition, a document known to Cuban historians of the African diaspora through the work of María del Carmen Barcia (whom the author mentions). The case records contained detailed descriptions and even drawings of the religious items that the police found in the cabildo house, a rare find. Lovejoy engages the document extensively, building a monograph around it by situating it within an Atlanticist framework, thereby offering a distinct entry point into it from Barcia's more Cuba-focused approach. A second source, the notarized will that Nepomuceno and his wife María Francisca Canejo filed together, allows the author to piece together some of the key chronological points in Prieto's trajectory. Lovejoy supplements this documentary base with aggregate data on the slave trade and on emancipados that he meticulously collected over the years.

The two main primary sources provide very small fragments of Prieto's life: the approximate date of his arrival in Cuba, his membership in the Lucumí Elló group and in the militias, and a formulaic testamentary account of his family life and property ownership. Even some of these pieces are questionable, since they were offered by members of the police (something that the author is aware of). For this reason, Lovejoy draws on Natalie Zemon Davis's “strategy of ‘sometimes imagining’ the past to contend with meaningful and sometimes contradictory ‘silences’” (4), pondering over the different possibilities for Prieto's trajectory between the known chronological postmarks. This interpretive exercise, of writing from the silences, which other scholars of slavery (Marisa Fuentes, for instance) have recently advocated for, poses challenges that Lovejoy should have emphasized more, but perhaps humbly chose not to.

First, it is an approach that has to bring to light the different possible social worlds that people of African descent occupied in the nineteenth-century Atlantic. For instance, Prieto might have gotten his freedom by serving as a soldier of the state, or by purchasing himself in cash or services. The author decides that it must have been the former, but the latter is not necessarily an impossibility. Second, this mode of writing reveals how aggressively selective the archive can be: we know so little about what happened to someone like Prieto, and what we do know comes to us because of the police. Lovejoy's account is at its most compelling when it uses archival silences to reveal the different possibilities that Africans in Havana could access or were barred from, while confronting head-on the ambiguities, erasures, and contradictions.

The Lucumís take center stage in this account; yet, the boundaries of this group appear to have been quite porous. This is a perennial challenge for scholars who have tackled the question of creolization. In the 1833 Lucumí War, members of other ethnic groups joined the Lucumís, and some Lucumís refused to join. There were likely other elements of identity that mattered in how the events transpired, raising another issue. What did it mean to create a Lucumí collective? How did being Lucumí shape one's politics? How did Prieto and others like him navigate their ambiguous political station—working as militia members for a state supporting slavery, while also watching recently arrived fellow Lucumí revolt?

For the story that it gives us and for raising these important questions, this monograph is a moving ethical act of memorialization of a little-known Black religious figure, sitting next to other insightful works that have relied on a similar biographical method.