On this date in 1812, the great Cuban revolutionary leader “Black” Jose Aponte was executed with eight comrades.
Like South Carolina’s Denmark Vesey, Aponte led a slave revolt but was not actually a slave himself. Instead, he was a free black woodworker, and a respected captain in Cuba’s black militia.
Aponte led a bold island-wide conspiracy of slaves and free blacks who aimed at liberating themselves by revolution.
A few hours’ sail off Cuba’s eastern coast lay Haiti, whose slaves had done just that only a few years before to the greater hope or terror — depending on which end of the lash one had — of slave societies all around the region.*
There is some debate over the degree to which Aponte personally can be said to have led or coordinated the various planned (and in some cases, actual) rebellions around Cuba. He was certainly a leader of such a plot in the capital city and viewed by Spanish authorities as a figure of significance across the island, and so the whole movement has become known as the Aponte Conspiracy or Aponte Rebellions.
By any name they were an impressive undertaking, and the widespread collaboration of free black militiamen must have chilled the blood of plantation owners who banked on these forces to maintain order in Cuba. Five of those hanged with Aponte were, like him, freemen.
Sadly lost to history is a book of of Aponte’s drawings which are known only by the descriptions of interrogators who were alarmed by its depictions of, among other things, black armies defeating white ones** … and maps of the military fortifications around Havana.
This book and the movement it supported were betrayed to the Spanish with the familiar consequences. Aponte and his comrades hanged outside Havana’s Catillo San Salvador de la Punta on the morning of April 9, 1812. Then their heads were posthumously hewed off for public display around the city.
* Hilario Herrera, a principal organizer of the conspiracy in Oriente, was himself a veteran of the revolution on Saint-Domingue.
** Some of the subversive drawings depicted Aponte’s grandfather, Captain Joaquin Aponte, fighting the 1762 English invasion of Havana.
On this day..
- 1892: Louis Anastay, "I wish to mount the scaffold"
- 1858: Alexander Anderson and Henry Richards
- 1836: Two English poisoners
- Feast Day of St. Eupsychius, anti-Apostate
- 1859: John Stoefel, the first hanged in Denver
- 1980: Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, Muqtada al-Sadr's father-in-law
- 1912: Tom Miles lynched
- 1945: Johann Georg Elser, dogged assassin
- 1868: The native prisoners of Emperor Tewodros II
- 1747: Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat
- 1740: Charles Drew, parricide
- 1975: Eight South Korean pro-democracy activists