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This article examines the women who became involved in Cuba's slave resistance movements of 1843 and 1844, drawing attention to those who molded that resistance in visible and public ways and those whose involvement has often been obscured or unnoticed. The narratives created around Fermina and Carlota Lucumí, two leading figures in the 1843 insurgencies, both rupture and complicate the masculine discourse around slave-movement leadership that has been central to historiographies of slave rebellion. I analyze the ways that these women became hyper-visible in archival records organized around patriarchal sensibilities of punishment. I also investigate the gendered narratives of betrayal and silence that intersperse the trial records and render illegible-if not wholly erase-the ways that black slave women helped to produce insurgent possibilities. I argue that women who marked themselves as unaligned with the insurgent project reveal some of the intriguing ways that most enslaved people encountered these resistance movements.
During the early 1840s, a widespread resistance movement emerged among enslaved and free black people in western Cuba. The insurgency they worked to build constitutes one of the most significant movements ever undertaken against Cuba's colonial regime. In 1844, this movement was brutally repressed, and has since become known to history as the conspiracy of La Escalera.1 For over a century, historians have written about this contentious movement and the political controversies it sparked, but almost none of these accounts have focused on the enslaved black women who helped to produce it.
This article explores some of the ways that enslaved women became involved in the resistance movements in western-central Cuba from 1843 to 1844. In so doing, it highlights the people who have been largely invisible in these movements and draws attention to their many hidden labors. In Cuba and elsewhere, enslaved black women were indispensable to producing "ideologies of antislavery," and they became central architects in their own freedom.2 By exploring how black slave women were critical to shaping insurgent possibilities in often unconventional ways, scholars can begin to question the kinds of actions that become most legible during moments of slave unrest, and those that are most consistently read as legitimate forms of resistance.3
My larger objective is to go beyond a traditional model of female inclusion that focuses primarily on...