Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.8.1.0117
• Published date: 01 April 2016
• Date: 01 April 2016
• Pages: 117315-119
• Author: Jennifer Nelson

IJCS Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals www.plutojournals.com/ijcs/

BOOK REVIEWS

Aisha K. Finch, Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba: La Escalera and the

Insurgencies of 1841-1844 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina

Press, 2015) pb 315pp. ISBN: 978-1-4696-2234-7

Reviewed by Jennifer Nelson

True to the innovative intentions of the Envisioning Cuba series, this book dem-

onstrates the importance of re-examining what we know about slave rebellion in

the Atlantic World. It introduces fresh perspectives for understanding different

elements of collective resistance and slave revolt, including the vital importance

of paying attention to gender. Successive slave rebellions rocked Cuba during the

nineteenth century, including two that the author emphatically links to the sus-

pected conspiracy known as La Escalera. In 1844, a widespread conspiracy was

uncovered on the island which involved a broad spectrum of society and pre-

empted anti-colonial struggles later in the century. Motivations for organising

such a movement abounded among white Cuban dissidents, free black and

coloured populations constantly confined by the limitations of their social con-

dition, and an ever expanding slave population, many of whom were from West

and Central Africa and had experience of warfare. Coupled with the suspicion

that the excessive state violence used to thwart the movement was a means of

targeting certain sectors of society pre-emptively, and that no such conspiracy

ever existed, scholars have struggled to demonstrate how these disparate groups

could have united around a common cause. The repression of the conspiracy

surpassed anything of its kind and involved the torture, exile, imprisonment and

interrogation of hundreds of people in official trials, and thousands overall in

the countryside. The common name for the conspiracy refers to the brutal meth-

ods of torture employed in its suppression, involved beatings while tied to a

ladder or escalera.

Despite the notoriety of this episode in Cuban history, volumes of archival

records remain largely untouched and there is still debate concerning many

aspects of the conspiracy, including the interaction between the white and

coloured suspected urban conspirators, and the scope of participation. British

abolitionism was another motivating factor, and although no official support

came from Britain, a point of dispute is the extent of involvement of the British

Consul and Superintendent of Liberated Africans, David Turnbull, and of his