Manuel Barcia. The Great Slave Revolt of 1825

This book moves beyond immediate questions of slave labor regime structures in colonial Cuba by offering a significant examination of the 1825 slave revolt in Guamacaro, a rural locality in the plantation countryside of western Cuba. One of the chief inspirations for the book, according to Manuel Barcia, is the paucity of scholarship on slave uprisings in Cuba between the well-documented 1812 Aponte rebellion and 1844 La Escalera conspiracy. For this and other reasons the work makes an important contribution to a vast and mature body of literature on slave resistance in the Western Hemisphere. The field's pervasiveness is evinced by scholars' recurring interest in slave revolt, rebellion, and revolution as lenses through which larger questions about the nature and purpose of all political struggle and social and cultural identity might be viewed. Among several reasons why the 1825 slave revolt of Colesio (the effective site of the revolt) is an important case study is its potential to reflect the impact of both the Haitian Revolution and the Latin American independence struggles that swept across the Americas in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The 1825 revolt also coincides with the United States' early foray into empire building (including a special interest in Cuba) signaled by the infamous 1823 Monroe Doctrine. By the time Guamacaro erupted in 1825, most of Spain's American colonies had won national independence and were deeply embroiled in the local process of state-building, even as Cuban planters and administrators chose to remain a colony “Ever-Faithful” to the decaying Spanish Empire. It is within this context of freedom-making from abroad and within that Barcia examines the local specificities of the 1825 Guamacaro revolt.

Ancient history · Art · Colonialism · Economic history · Empire · Historiography · Humanities · Identity (music) · Independence (probability theory) · Latin Americans · Political science · Politics · Resistance (ecology) · Scholarship · Sociology · State (computer science) · Cuban History and Society · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · Law