[1] Anselmo Suárez y Romero's masterpiece: Francisco, also known as El ingenio o las delicias del campo (The sugar mill or the delights of the country),[2] written between 1838 and 1839, is considered the first anti-slavery novel in the Americas.
The other work which encompassed slavery, was the short story Petrona y Rosalía written in 1838 by Félix Tanco y Bosmeniel (1797–1871), unpublished until 1925, which also touched upon slaves' lives in the 19th century.
The manuscript was delivered to British official and abolitionist Richard Robert Madden in 1840, along with a revised copy of the work Autobiografía de un esclavo (English: Autobiography of a slave) by Juan Francisco Manzano, which had been proofread by Suárez y Romero himself.
[12] Madden himself thought that the narrative employed by Suárez y Romero in Francisco had a palpable realm of invisible realism in it.
No other book, in his opinion, was as descriptive, or as graphically drafted, as in Francisco 's prose, in which slavery was depicted with the same intellectual rigor as in real life in Cuba.