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The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery. Matt D. Childs. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. 300 pp.
In recent years, scholars have dedicated numerous monographs, articles, and edited volumes to the Haitian Revolution's influence on slave revolts and black nationalism in the Caribbean and broader Americas. In The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery, Matt Childs contributes to this discussion with the analysis of an important, yet understudied, revolt that involved Afro-Cubans of varying conditions: Creole and African-bom, urban and rural, male and female, and free and enslaved. It is the diversity of participants in the Aponte revolt that most interests Childs, as he devotes the majority of the monograph to illustrating how Afro-Cubans came to transcend these binary categories in order to coordinate a series of anti-slavery revolts throughout the island. As Childs shows, Afro-Cubans came together despite a multitude of differences partially because Haiti served as such an inspiring example to the region's slaves and free people of color. Through painstaking research conducted in Cuban, Spanish and even English and French archives, Childs uncovered that several of the participants in the revolts that extended from the eastern side of the island to Havana had spent time in other Caribbean islands, such as Jamaica and Saint Domingue. Most, it seems, hoped to create a Haitian-like polity that blacks would rule.
Nonetheless, it is when analyzing the changes wrought by Cuba's expansion of slavery during the "Age of Revolution" that Childs is at his most persuasive. As the expansion of slavery transformed Cuban society from a hierarchical one based on caste, to a society in which race became the primary marker of distinction, Afro-Cubans found shared cause for rebellion. While most of the Americas underwent nationalist revolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Cuba held fast to Spanish colonialism. Inspired by, among other things, the French Enlightenment, many new nations touted the "rights of man," even while refusing to embrace full social equality. Nevertheless, many chose to abolish slavery, while Cuba not only refused to abolish slavery, but taking the place of Haiti as the world's leading sugar producer, increased slave imports three-fold.
Slaves and free people of color throughout...