Unlike the two iconic Cuban antislavery narratives, Cirilo Villaverde's Cecilia Valdes and Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda's Sab, which have excited much critical interest, Anselmo Suarez y Romero's Francisco is sometimes treated as a nondescript novel of dubious literary stock and suspect antislavery pedigree. Nevertheless, this work occupies a special place in the gallery of these narratives. It was one of the first responses to the request from Richard Madden, the abolitionist Commissioner of the British Mixed Court, for literary compositions by young writers illustrating the Cuban view of slavery. As one of the first full-length literary pieces on the antislavery theme, it began a cycle that was to last for half a century. Suarez, who was born in Havana in 1818, started writing the novel in 1838, and completed it in 1839 at the age of 21. His youth qualified him for special mentoring by the more experienced members of the tertulia or writers' club organized under the auspices of Domingo Del Monte, a patron of the literary arts. Francisco is, in addition, the antislavery novel whose genealogy has been most fully documented. The novel was composed cooperatively, being in pan the product of ongoing exchanges between the author and members of the Del Monte tertulia, who contributed to its production by their commendations and criticisms. Whether to shed light or to cast their shadow on subsequent interpretations of the novel, the letters between members of the writers' circle during the course of its composition have been included as indispensable extensions of the text in its various editions. The edited version of the manuscript, which was included in the antislavery album delivered to Madden, has not been published and seems to have been lost. If the author is to be believed, the unedited version was the one that finally appeared in print in New York some 36 years later in 1880, after the abolition of slavery in Cuba. Neither version was subject, therefore, to the constraints of official censorship; the edited one was destined for Madden, not for public consumption in Cuba, while the original was published under a more liberal political regime. In offering his preferred reading of the work, Suarez's apologetic posture on its style is counterbalanced by his unabashed defence of its compelling moral message: usually laugh at the many clumsy words and phrases and the host of redundancies and tedious repetitions; but when I think of Francisco and Dorotea, victims of a horrible institution, I believe that even the most severe literary judge would have to silence his criticism to join me in weeping for those two wretched slaves1 (41). In a similar fashion, different commentators on the novel have used canonical criteria to make light of its literary value and have helped to divert attention from its discursive dimension.2 Using the insights offered by contemporary literary theories this essay proposes a reading of the unedited version that will broaden and deepen our understanding of the novel by focusing on the subversive effect of various unobtrusive signs included by the author. Postcolonial readings of colonial discourse, Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the novel, as well as the methods of deconstruction and psychoanalysis are interpretive tools that will be engaged to explore certain unmined areas of this novel. These theoretical tools will help to tease out its multiple threads and, hopefully, help to correct some of the existing misperceptions of aspects of Suarez's composition. At the centre of the novel is the cliched Romantic fable of the ill-fated love between Francisco and Dorotea, two favoured house slaves, which is thwarted by their widowed mistress, Dolores Mendizabal and her son, Ricardo. Dona Dolores not only refuses their pleas for permission to marry, but eventually forbids their relationship. The slaves continue their affair in secret, and this leads to Dorotea's pregnancy, a crime which earns them expulsion from serving in the house. …
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Jun 1, 2015
Ana Mateos 
Open Access