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Access Type
WSU Access
Date of Award
January 2023
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Department
Communication
First Advisor
Michael Fuhlhage
Abstract
This dissertation examines discourses that were produced and disseminated by the Spanish colonial administrations that controlled Cuba between 1832 and 1845. As uprisings among enslaved Africans threatened Spanish supremacy, the Spanish Crown granted capitanes generales, or governors, full political and military authority over the island. The capitanes generales, all of whom were high-ranking Spanish military personnel, were tasked with consolidating control over all subjects. The desperation of the capitanes as they attempted to fulfill their duties to the crown is evident in the decrees, letters, and news publications they created, endorsed, and circulated. This dissertation approaches administrative texts as a specific genre: Colonial discourses, which are fictions deployed in service of a colonial agent or administrative body. The capitanes generales and other administrators were steeped in the symbolic cultural realities formed through the forces of empire, white supremacy, and capitalism, which were reflected in the discourses they produced. This dissertation uses rhetorical and “microtextual” methods to formulate a critique of those systems of power. Constitutive rhetoric explains how texts interpellated audiences in the symbolic reality of loyalty to Spain—even as political dissent flourished. In addition, the rhetorical situation accounts for the complex relationships between individual rhetors and the exigencies they attempted to overcome. The conflation of an individual administrator’s identity with the authority bestowed on him by the Spanish Crown can be understood through the rhetoric of identity construction. Finally, the “microtextual” approach, a method derived from microhistory, describes this dissertation’s focus on historical events and individuals as well as the implications of administrators’ grammatical constructions and word choices. The first of the Spanish capitanes generales examined in this dissertation is Mariano Ricafort (1832-1834), who annulled freedom of the press and issued decrees regulating the migration of people of African descent to Cuba. The next capitán, Miguel Tacón (1834-1838), was an avowed enemy of white criollos (of European descent and born in Cuba) and expanded Spanish military presence to curtail “vagrancy.” The third capitán examined in this dissertation, Gerónimo Valdés (1841-1843), reformed the Cuban slave code to regulate the physical punishment of enslaved people. While this was considered a relatively progressive measure, Valdés’ 1842 Edict reinforced slavery as an institution and continued the marginalization of people of African descent. Finally, Leopoldo O’Donnell (1843-1848) wrote letters to other colonial administrators about the threat of Black rebellion. After discovering conspiracies on plantations in Matanzas, O’Donnell altered Cuba’s judicial systems to more effectively locate, arrest, torture, sentence, and execute those suspected of rebellion. O’Donnell’s brutal repression of anti-slavery and anti-colonial movements in 1844 became known as La Conspiración de la Escalera, the Ladder Conspiracy. In the decades leading up to La Escalera, colonial administrations deployed rhetoric that stereotyped and blamed people of African descent for political and social unrest, and absolved individuals of the violence they committed by referencing the authority of Spanish and colonial law. As people with various amounts of African and European ancestry protested slavery and Spanish rule, the authorities collapsed Cuba’s complex racial hierarchy into a false binary of “people of color,” an umbrella term for people with various amounts of African heritage, versus whites—or rather, the colonial elite. This dissertation views La Escalera as the culmination of decades of distortive colonial rhetorics, which represented Black rebellion as a threat that could only be contained by absolute loyalty to the Spanish Empire and Cuban capitanes generales.
Recommended Citation
Lindner, Anna Elise, "Crying Conspiracy: White Discourses On Black Rebellion In Spanish Colonial Cuba, 1832-1845" (2023). Wayne State University Dissertations. 3887.
https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations/3887