The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery (review)

Every significant study of Cuba in the last fifty years has referenced the work of José Luciano Franco on the 1812, conspiración de Aponte (Aponte Conspiracy). Matt Childs, as one of the few historians in recent times to work directly and intensively with the actual archival documents relative to this event and the series of slave rebellions, plantation uprisings and urban unrest of free people of color in Cuba during 1812, provides a new interpretation of classic data, making his one of the most important works in Cuban Studies published in the last fifteen years. The book, although primarily a narrative history, has an interdisciplinary perspective, a broad appeal to generalists on a wide variety of topics and specialists of Cuban slavery, emancipation and independence. However, the title presages a problem with the work. Is the book about the Aponte Rebellion in Cuba, or does it situate the event in the wider context of Atlantic slavery—or both? If the latter, as the author says, is this too Herculean a task to be accomplished in the book's 190 pages of text?

One of the new interpretations found in the book is Childs' identification of the events of 1812 as the Aponte Rebellion rather than the traditional rendering of the "Aponte conspiracy." In a footnote, he explains his reasoning for doing so. He objects to the colonial authorities and scholars who have historically identified as a conspiracy any act that was interrupted before total fruition either by it being denounced to the authorities or by colonial surveillance. Childs sees conspiracies as acts of rebellion. Rather than a footnote, this should be in the body of the text because his rendering of these events as acts of rebellion is so convincingly argued by the evidence found in the primary documents he is using.

The book is written from the perspective of Diaspora Studies, which argues for establishing links, relationships, a wider panorama and a more global understanding than small scale and local studies. However, the real strengths of this book are the use of the voluminous documentation in archives on both sides of the Atlantic and the far-reaching ramifications of the documents for discrediting traditional attempts to minimize the roles of so-called slave conspiracies. Moreover, the book offers a revisionist history of Cuba which foregrounds the communities of African dissent as generative actors in the intertwined process of slave emancipation and independence. Childs' use of the documents shows the events of 1812 as well thought out acts of resistance throughout the island of Cuba. Whether these acts were related and how they were coordinated is a bit more problematic. Childs first explores the rebellion through the involvement of some of the rebels in the colonial militia composed of morenos and pardos.During the nineteenth century transformation of Cuba into a colonial slave society, slave owners questioned the wisdom of arming free people of African descent and diminished the role of the militia in Cuban society.

Childs sees the militia as an important conduit for providing the rebels with access to military training, arms and camaraderie. Yet the declining role of the militia, the fact that Aponte and others while having once served in the militia were no longer a part of it, and Childs' semi-biographical table showing few of the 329 people arrested to be members, suggest that the militia was not the vehicle of orchestration for these events. According to the table, the vast majority of participants in the rebellion were young, African-born males. Given what we know about expansion and state building throughout West Africa and the role of the military during this period, there might be a future line of inquiry more important than the colonial militia.

The book's commitment to a close reading and use of archival documents for understanding the histories of...