Carlota (rebel leader)
[1] Carlota, alongside fellow enslaved Lucumí Ferminia, was known as a leader of the slave rebellion at the Triunvirato plantation in Matanzas, Cuba during the Year of the Lash in 1843–1844.
[1] Together with Ferminia Lucumí, Carlota led the slave uprising of the sugar mill "Triunvirato" in the province of Matanzas, Cuba on November 5, 1843.
[2][3][4] Her memory has also been utilized throughout history by the Cuban government in connection to 20th century political goals, most notably Operation Carlota, or Cuba's intervention in Angola in 1975.
Its name derives from the most notable form of torture inflicted on slaves and free people of color during the wave of repression that followed the violent end of the rebellion.
[23] Shifting imperial and economic conditions in Cuba in the first half of the nineteenth century fomented a wave of slave rebellions in the 1830s and 40s.
[25] It is impossible to know exactly what conditions led to the slave revolts that constituted La Escalera, but the wave of violence and repression that followed was indisputable.
Many understood it as a massive conspiracy by the Cuban government to justify the repression inflicted upon people of color at the time, with no actual slave resistance efforts taking place.
[27] However, part of La Escalera and the ensuing repression's significance came from their inspiring new rebellious groups to form throughout the century in Cuba.
[8] Slaves frequently deployed strategic answers for survival, which then had to be taken down by a mediator with undoubtedly different goals and biases than the person whose testimony was being written.
[8] Finch refers to documents created by white officials at the time as "fictitious" due to their deeply biased and violent nature.
[29] However, authors and historians have worked to read archival documents critically to understand a more nuanced perspective of biased material to complete a narrative of slave agency and insurrection.
For example, in Cuban historian José Luciano Franco's analysis of the Triunvirato rebellion, Carlota takes a backseat to the male leaders of the revolt.
[30] Similarly, in other texts on the rebellion like Ricardo Vazquez's Triunvirato – Historia de un Rincon Azucarero de Cuba and Manuel Barcia's Seeds of Insurrection, Carlota is barely mentioned, although Barcia has since discussed her role and that of her co-leader Ferminia Lucumí in West African Warfare in Bahia and Cuba: Soldier Slaves in the Atlantic World, from 2014.
[31][32] While it is impossible to know exactly why Carlota's impact has only been taken up by a relatively small number of scholars, her absence can serve to reify the traditional view of slave rebellion as a particularly masculine affair.
[33] Due to Carlota's sparse mentions and perhaps misrepresentation in the archive, as well as her absence from secondary sources, it is difficult to understand a holistic picture of her life and specific role in La Escalera.
Long after Carlota's death in the aftermath of the Triunvirato rebellion, her memory was mobilized by the post-revolutionary Cuban state.
[10] Cuba's intervention in Angola in 1974 to aid in its independence struggle was named after the rebel slave woman, in an event known as Operación Carlota.
[34] Historian Myra Ann Houser and others have illuminated how Fidel Castro and his revolutionary government capitalized on Cuba's enslaved and rebellious past to further their political aims.
[34][30][35][36] A key tenet of this line of thinking was Castro's ideology of the oppressed rising up to defeat the oppressor, as enslaved people had done in Cuba throughout the 19th century.
[38] The government tapped into its enslaved and rebellious past to highlight it as a natural precursor to the 1959 socialist revolution, and the continuous revolutionary spirit of 20th century Cuba.
[39] Castro's ability to do this rested on the particular conceptualization of race relations in Cuba at the time, which emphasized Cubanidad, or Cubanness, over racial identity.
[40] Ideas of nation-building took precedence over racial divisions, allowing Castro to conceptualize Cuba's African past as affecting all of its citizens equally in the 20th century, and thus justifying a "return" to Angola in the 1970s.
[45] The project's goals are to better illuminate the history of slavery, understand what global transformations came from its legacies, and contribute to an international culture of peace.
Seeds of Insurrection: Domination and Resistance on Western Cuban Plantations, 1808-1848 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 2008) Barcia, Manuel.
Paquette, Robert L. Sugar Is Made with Blood: the Conspiracy of La Escalera and the Conflict between Empires over Slavery in Cuba.
