The Black Soldier of Santiago: General Lorenzo’s Uprising of 1836 in Santiago de Cuba

This paper marks the beginning of a new research project that aims to investigate the intersection of Blackness, radical politics, slavery and self-emancipation in the Caribbean during the Age of Revolutions. It proposes that General Lorenzo’s uprising of 1836 in Santiago de Cuba is a fundamental episode in the history of revolutions in the Atlantic World and explores the motivations, fears and aspirations of the Black soldiers who participated in this failed revolution. Ultimately, this project aims to contribute to ongoing debates on colonial slavery, the role of Black people (and Black soldiers in particular) to imagine post-emancipation societies, and the relationship between liberal and modern thinking and the legacies of slavery.

In the 1830s, Spain was a very different country to the one that had resisted the Napoleonic invasion. The independence of most of the American territories, the civil war, the spectre of the Haitian Revolution and the long exiles of some of its key liberal intellectuals, had created a much volatile political climate in which many pledged to preserve what was left of a shrinking empire at any cost and others dreamed of a radical revolution. Among the latest was General Lorenzo, the Provincial Governor of Santiago de Cuba, a major slave-trading hub at the time. When the news of the formation of a liberal government in Madrid reached his city, he ordered its people to rise up in arms to protect the revolution. Among them, a group of Black people, free and formerly enslaved, sword alliance to Lorenzo and his radical program.

I argue that this liberal uprising provides an exceptional window onto the study of race relations and radical politics in, not only Cuba, but also in the wider Atlantic World during the Age of Revolution more generally.