Novel
Francisco
Not translated into English
Anselmo Suárez y Romero · 1880
Synopsis
In Cuba, before 1838, Francisco, an enslaved coachman belonging to Doña Dolores Mendizábal, and Dorotea, enslaved like him, love each other and wish to marry, but their mistress refuses. Her son Ricardo, infatuated with Dorotea, hounds his rival at the family's sugar mill, where the overseer Antonio and the contramayoral, an enslaved man charged with watching the others, subject the workers to the whip and the cane harvest. Beyond the sentimental plot, the novel depicts plantation life, its customs, its songs and its African rites.
Context
Written in 1838 and 1839 at the request of Domingo del Monte, for the British commissioner Richard Madden, who was preparing in London a collection against slavery, the manuscript was handed to him in 1840 together with the autobiography of the enslaved Juan Francisco Manzano, on which the novel draws. Colonial censorship forbade its publication: it circulated in secret and appeared only in 1880 in New York, two years after the author's death. Regarded as the first anti-slavery novel of Spanish America, it prepared the way for Cecilia Valdés and Sab, and Sergio Giral drew from it in 1975 his film The Other Francisco.
Who it is for
For a Romantic novel that describes without varnish the condition of enslaved people on Cuba's sugar plantations.
Prizes and reception
Praised by Madden for the truth of every one of its lines, it was judged unoriginal by the critic Enrique Piñeyro.