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Slave rebellion and the conundrum of cosmopolitanism: Plácido and La Escalera in a neglected Cuban antislavery novel by Orihuela

Abstract In 1852, Andrés Avelino de Orihuela, a white Canary Island immigrant to Cuba in exile in Paris, translated Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin twice. After publishing La cabaña del tío Tom, he then “translated” Stowe in a different way: he wrote a Cuban antislavery novel. In El Sol de Jesús del Monte, Eduardo, a white lawyer, embodies the conundrum of race within cosmopolitanism: he professes to be an egalitarian citizen of the world, yet betrays his mulatto lover Matilde for a white woman. The novel places Matilde's personal tragedy in the context of the colonial government's destruction of the community of free people of color during La Escalera (1843–1844), a series of antislavery and anticolonial conspiracies. In this sentimental melodrama that elicits sympathy for victims of racism, Eduardo's rejection of Matilde signifies a failed unification of whites and Afro-Cubans in a national romance à la Doris Sommer. When Matilde's family flees to Veracruz and builds a new life – Matilde marries a Mexican mestizo – mulattoes do not appear subordinate to whites, as in Uncle Tom's Cabin, but instead embody the mixed-race future of Latin America. The novel's focus on the racial contradictions of Eduardo's self-styled cosmopolitanism constitutes Orihuela's critical, “vernacular cosmopolitanism” (Homi Bhabha). I argue that Orihuela's critique of Cuban exiles’ collusion with the colonial government's vilification of Plácido and repression of free people of color exposes a new permutation of a longstanding racial contradiction in Latin American republicanism. Indeed, Simón Bolívar assassinated two prominent mulatto leaders in the 1820s for allegedly promoting race over nation. Bolívar had opposed slavery, yet limited democracy to ward off a repeat of the Haitian Revolution in Gran Colombia (Aline Helg). At a time when antislavery novels reinforced racist discourses, El Sol de Jesús del Monte unflinchingly points to white racism as the main challenge facing the would-be egalitarian republics of Latin America.