Freedom's Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution

The definitive treatment of how the Haitian Revolution shaped Cuba, arguing that Saint-Domingue and Cuba were mirror images: what was destroyed in one — the plantation system — was simultaneously created in the other, as the fires of 1791 lit the furnaces of Cuban sugar. Drawing on Cuban, Spanish, French, Haitian, British, and US archives, Ferrer reconstructs what people in Havana and Santiago knew about the revolution, how enslaved Cubans acted on that knowledge (especially in the Aponte Conspiracy of 1812), and how post-independence Haiti conducted an active antislavery foreign policy that challenged the Atlantic slave order.