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This chapter explores how Plácido’s poems on race differed from that of Manzano, his enslaved counterpart.Plácido, whose mulatto racial identity was never in doubt, saw little need to create such an image for public consumption.Rather, his satirical poems mocked the mulatto desire to become white through the denial of African ancestry.This chapter examines Plácido’s Catholic poetry alongside his racial satire to demonstrate that the contradiction inherent in his literary work.The analysis of Plácido’s religious poetry in tandem with his satire exposes the apparent contradictions that arose from the articulation of a racial politics in defiance of whiteness on the one hand and the adulation of Catholicism on the other.Poems such as “Death of the Redeemer,” “The Birth of Christ,” “For the Death of Christ,” “The Resurrection,” and two relatively unknown poems, “My Imprisonment” and “To Lince, from Prison” are historical evidence of how Plácido negotiated good social standing with local ecclesiastical elites.

This chapter demonstrates how Plácido appealed to African ideas of spirit and cosmos to create a blueprint for black Cuban liberation.This chapter brings two narratives into contention to explore the political function of African-inspired spirituality in Plácido’s poetry: the poems about African-inspired spirituality and the government’s account about his conspiratorial activities to depose the colonial regime.This chapter makes the African epistemological claims in Plácido’s poetry legible while also examining the government indictment of the poet for the “horrendous crime” of “conspiracy against the white race.”This chapter constitutes the first serious examination of Plácido’s poetry alluding to African-inspired spirituality.Poems such as “To the Mountain Pan,” “The Silhouette of a Soul,” “Ghosts, Witches and Spirits,” “The Oath,” “To the Virgin of the Rosary,” “Me Don’t Know What I Said,” and “The Little Devil” acknowledge the inherent power of sacred oaths, carnival and the African orishasto transform the outcome of events in the materials world.

This chapter discusses Plácido and Manzano’s involvement in the 1844 antislavery movement and it refutes the notion that Manzano was an apolitical author.With few exceptions, critics have claimed that Manzano was bereft of a political project and argued that Plácido’s liberal discourse had no relationship to his racial politics.The final chapter disproves both of these theses.It analyzes the government narrative of black conspiracy and white victimhood side by side with a close reading of Plácido and Manzano’s letters and depositions.Government accounts of uprising legitimize power by deliberately creating silences, speaking in code, and otherwise dissembling the truth.Thus, this chapter deconstructs the official government narrative and Manzano and Plácido’s joint interrogation.It highlights the way that Manzano and Plácido developed different strategies to distance themselves from the 1844 antislavery movement, the notion of anti-white conspiracy, and even from each other.

This chapter examines the slowing of reform at the Santa Clara Convent in Havana, Cuba, during the period from 1770 to 1782. The apparent lull in the pace of the Bourbon Reform program occurred during the decade-long interim between the fall of the Marqués de Esquilache in 1766 and the rise of José de Gálvez in 1776. During this period, the Clarist nuns continued to reject the common life and appeared to be in no hurry to reduce their numbers to ninety as prescribed in Franciscan Commissary General Plácido de Pinedo's 1767 regulation.

In the last two decades of his life, Torroba came to serve as a cultural ambassador for Spain. He did this not only as a composer and conductor but also as someone increasingly involved in cultural administration. He became president of the Sociedad General de Autores de España and director of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes. His administrative legerdemain had a decided impact on issues of copyright, performance, and recording during a period in which technological advances were changing the rules of the game. This period witnessed his increasing collaboration with the Romero family of guitarists, who premiered and recorded his concertos. Though he ceased composing zarzuelas, he continued to conduct and record them. Torroba did maintain a place on the stage with several ballets and a final opera, El poeta. This scene closes with the composer’s sudden illness, death, and funeral.