Manzano, Juan Francisco

c. 1797
1853

Born during a sugar boom that was transforming Cuba into the world's most valuable slave-based colony, Juan Francisco Manzano became not only a celebrated poet but also the author of the only autobiography ever written by a Latin American slave that was published before Emancipation. He learned to read and write while serving as a domestic slave in the urban households of the island's titled nobility. He published his first verses, Poesías líricas, in 1821. His talents attracted the attention of Domingo del Monte, the island's most influential intellectual, and in 1836, after hearing Manzano recite "Mis treinta años," a touching personal sonnet, del Monte and members of his literary circle raised a sum equivalent to $800 to purchase Manzano's freedom from María de la Luz de Zayas.

Encouraged by del Monte, Manzano had begun writing his autobiography the previous year. Only the first of two parts of the completed manuscript has survived. In 1839 del Monte handed an edited, fifty-two-page Spanish version of part one to Richard Robert Madden, a visiting British official and abolitionist, who seized on Manzano's words to promote the international antislavery crusade. In Britain, Madden translated the manuscript along with samples of Manzano's poetry for publication. He introduced Manzano's story in 1840 as "the most perfect picture of Cuban slavery that ever has been given to the world." Madden depicted a humble, unambiguous slave suffering unremitting humiliation and debasement by whites, although, in truth, he simplified Manzano's more complicated portrayal of himself and his insular world by omitting and reordering passages in the Spanish manuscript. Not until 1937, after Cuba's national library purchased a manuscript copy of part one of the autobiography once owned by del Monte, was a Spanish edition of the manuscript published for the first time.

Manzano speaks of the "vicissitudes" of life, as his fortunes swing between masters and mistresses of different temperament. The Marquesa de Jústiz de Santa Ana (Beatriz de Jústiz y Zayas) doted on Manzano in his early youth as if he were her own child. His subsequent mistress, the Marquesa de Prado-Ameno (María de la Concepción Aparicio del Manzano y Jústiz), capriciously brutalized him. For various missteps, Manzano suffered lashings, beatings, head shavings, imprisonment in stocks or makeshift jails, and transportation to the countryside for a stretch of hard time on a sugar plantation. He expressed ambivalent feelings for those above and below him in Cuba's graduated color hierarchy. He practiced Catholicism, and although he tended to identify with white culture, he remained lovingly attached to his mixed-race family members, from whom he was often distanced. While receiving punishment in the countryside, Manzano felt abandoned, like "a mulatto among blacks." He married twice, first to a woman of darker skin (Marcelina Campos). His second marriage in 1835 to a free woman of color (María del Rosario) provoked dissent from her kin who complained that Manzano's slave status and darker phenotype made him unworthy.

Anticipating that one day he would obtain his "natural right" to freedom, Manzano consciously developed the skills of an artist, tailor, chef, and artisan. Creating poetry helped ease the burdens of a delicate, intellectual man, and in his artistic endeavors, he acquired a substantial measure of self-redemption from the social death of slavery. Indeed, he ends part one of the manuscript in rebellion against his abusive treatment, fleeing to Havana on a stolen mount. In 1844 Spanish officials arrested Manzano along with thousands of other persons of color on suspicion of involvement in the alleged revolutionary Conspiracy of La Escalera. He remained in jail for about a year, a repressive experience that appears to have silenced his creative voice.

See also Autobiography, U.S.; Literature

Bibliography

Manzano, Juan Francisco. The Autobiography of a Slave; Autogiografía de un esclavo: A Bilingual Edition. Translated by Evelyn Picon Garfield. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996.

Mullen, Edward J. The Life and Poems of a Cuban Slave: Juan Francisco Manzano, 1797–1854 [sic]. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1981.

robert l. paquette (2005)