The Sun of Jesús del Monte: A Cuban Antislavery Novel

Translated into English for the first time, Andrés Avelino de Orihuela’s El Sol de Jesús del Monte is a landmark Cuban antislavery novel. Published originally in 1852, the same year as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it provides an uncompromising critique of discourses of white superiority and an endorsement of equality for free people of color. The Sun of Jesús del Monte is the only Cuban novel of its time to focus on La Escalera, or the Ladder Rebellion, a major anticolonial and slave insurrection that shook the world’s wealthiest colony in 1843-44. It is also the only Cuban novel of its time to take direct aim at white privilege and unsparingly denounce the oppression of free people of color that intensified after the insurrection. This new critical edition-featuring an invaluable, contextualizing introduction and afterword in addition to the new English translation-offers readers the most detailed portrait of the everyday lives and plight of free people of color in Cuba in any novel up to the 1850s.

David Luis-Brown is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and English at Claremont Graduate University and author of Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States.