SOURCE: Coulthard, G. R. “The Anti-Slavery Novel in Cuba: Indians and Negroes.” In Race and Colour in Caribbean Literature, pp. 6-26. London: Oxford University Press, 1962.

In the following essay, Coulthard discusses antislavery themes in several nineteenth-century Cuban novels and poems, arguing that abolitionism was in many respects a cause taken up by Cuban liberals to gain the support of the island's black majority to help overthrow Spain's colonial rule.

One of the aims of writers in Latin America in the nineteenth century was to find an original and distinctive note for their literary creations and one of the subjects they introduced to lend an unmistakable American flavour to their works was the autochthonous Indian. It is a commonplace of Latin American literary criticism that the Indian of the nineteenth century Romantics was idealised and totally artificial. Nevertheless, the quantity of Indianist writing is impressive,¹ and the fact that...