Commentary

1. Image 21 is based on more recent local history. It depicts the blessing of Havana’s then-new cemetery, the Campo Santo or Espada Cemetery, which was inaugurated in 1806, at about the time Aponte claims to have started working on the book. (Ferrer 2014, 319-320)

2. The image shows two coffins, one of a Havana governor who died in 1766, the other of a Havana bishop who died in 1801. READ MORE

   Both coffins were exhumed in 1806, and transferred and reburied in the new cemetery with a solemn ceremony and blessing, which Aponte himself may well have witnessed and certainly would have heard about. Aponte’s description makes no mention of the fact that both men had died of yellow fever. People in Havana, of course, knew all about yellow fever, and they knew also of the role it had played in the Haitian Revolution. They had read the regular accounts in the Gaceta de Madrid of the decimation of the French army in 1802-03, in part by yellow fever. They had seen the arrival of many sick French soldiers and troops, some of whom were housed and died in the San Lazaro hospital, pictured in several of Aponte’s maps.[101] In this particular image, then, Aponte represented the death by yellow fever of two powerful white men from Havana. The allusion to the disease may have been coincidental. Or the picture may have served to suggest that the would-be rebels, like their earlier counterparts in Saint-Domingue, had a potential ally in nature, one they might use strategically if and when the time came to do so. (Ferrer 2014, 319-320)