Juan Francisco Manzano and Gabriel de la Concepcion Valdes
(Placido) were perhaps the most important and innovative Cuban
writers of African descent during the Spanish colonial era. Both
nineteenth-century authors used Catholicism as a symbolic Language
for African-inspired spirituality. Likewise, Placido and Manzano
subverted the popular imagery of neoclassicism and Romanticism in
order to envision black freedom in the tradition of the Haitian
Revolution. Placido and Manzano envisioned emancipation through the
lens of African spirituality, a transformative moment in the
history of Cuban letters. Matthew Pettway examines how the
portrayal of African ideas of spirit and cosmos in otherwise
conventional texts recur throughout early Cuban literature and
became the basis for Manzano and Placido's antislavery philosophy.
The portrayal of African-Atlantic religious ideas spurned the elite
rationale that literature ought to be a barometer of highbrow
cultural progress. Cuban debates about freedom and selfhood were
never the exclusive domain of the white Creole elite. Pettway's
emphasis on African-inspired spirituality as a source of knowledge
and a means to sacred authority for black Cuban writers deepens our
understanding of Manzano and Placido not as mere imitators but as
aesthetic and political pioneers. As Pettway suggests, black Latin
American authors did not abandon their African religious heritage
to assimilate wholesale to the Catholic Church. By recognizing the
wisdom of African ancestors, they procured power in the struggle
for black liberation.
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