A Havana carpenter uses portraits of black rulers to recruit rebels

Soon after Henri Christophe was crowned in the north of Haiti in 1811, the free black carpenter Jose Antonio Aponte began a conspiracy in Havana and drew pictures of revolutionary leaders as a way of raising consciousness among those he approached. Geggus places the episode in a longer Cuban sequence. Five years earlier enslaved people on plantations near Havana had planned to take the city’s forts so they could be free as those in Saint-Domingue were and become masters of the land, and in 1796 Africans planning a revolt in Spanish Santo Domingo went for advice to Saint-Domingue insurgents settled nearby. In several of these cases the promise of Haitian help was not a fact. It was a morale device, and in Aponte’s plot a free black man went so far as to impersonate the Saint-Domingue leader Jean-Francois.