Commentary

1. Pages 8 and 9 show the planet Mercury in the sign of Gemini on a cart drawn by two milans and whose influence—as Aponte has indicated by a caduceus— pertains to the achievements of trade. (Palmié 2002, 105)

2. On the left side, Aponte continues, one sees Spring personified and the counsel and force of Trade itself. READ MORE

   The sentry of Trade, who tries to impede Contraband, meets his death and fails to stop the latter. (Palmié 2002, 105)

3. Image 8-9 is a surprising and complex allegory about greed and commerce. READ MORE

   Aponte testified that the picture depicted the planet “Mercury of Gemini” in a carriage pulled by two large, rapacious birds. There was a green star and a caduceo, a staff signifying the progress of commerce. In the picture, a guard attempts to stop contraband and instead encounters death, either because he is personally unable to stop it, or because contraband cannot be stopped generally. A launch from the ship approaches; avarice jumps on the dock and also meets death.[102] The story so far is general; it could be an allegory about colonial, indeed maritime, commerce anywhere. But Aponte clearly set the scene in Havana harbor in 1807-08. (Ferrer 2014, 320)

4. In the nearby carthouse, we see a portrait of Godoy, who, Aponte said, had, at the time he composed the book, reached the zenith of his political career. (Palmié 2002, 105)

5. The carriage, importantly, had a picture of Manuel Godoy, Spain’s controversial prime minister, favorite of the king, lover of the queen, enemy of the heir.READ MORE

   He was pictured, said Aponte, at the height of his power. While some have taken this to mean after he received the title of Principe de la Paz in 1795, it is clear that the picture alluded to his 1807 elevation to the newly created position of Admiral of Spain and the Indies and Protector of Maritime Commerce. In 1807, Godoy had established the Almirantazgo, or Admiralty, a reform aimed at revitalizing the Spanish Navy after its defeat against the British at Trafalgar in 1805 and following British attacks on Spanish shipping the Rio de la Plata in 1806. With the reform Godoy, gained supreme control of the Navy and the authority to provide “passports” to all ships flying Spanish flags and all foreign ships visiting Spanish ports.[103] (Ferrer 2014, 320-321)

6. The picture, he testified, included a falling feather to symbolize the fall of Godoy from power, presumably during the crisis of 1808. READ MORE

   In Aponte’s vision, then, the author of commerce’s imputed progress met his downfall. (Ferrer 2014, 321)

7. News of the reform arrived in Havana in March 1807, and Aponte explicitly referred to its arrival in his description of the image, noting that the vessel shown in the picture was the one that brought the news of the Almirantazgo to Havana. READ MORE

   In honor of Godoy and the reform, the Real Consulado paid for the Alameda, the city’s maritime boulevard, to be lit and decorated. In September, an opera titled Apolo y América —with Apollo symbolizing Godoy — opened in Havana. Later that month, a grand party was organized in the Real Factoria de Tabacos. The building and its surroundings were festooned for the occasion, complete with newly commissioned frescoes by an Italian artist. The Real Consulado also published a color engraving for the occasion, depicting some of the celebrations in Havana. Though no copies appear to have survived, it was said to include an image of the house of Conde O’Reilly, lavishly decorated with lights and the caduceo.[104] Aponte would have seen the house, centrally located within the city walls, just as he would have seen or heard about the feast at the Real Factoria de Tabacos, not too far from his own home. With no surviving images from Aponte’s book or the 1807 celebrations, no direct comparison is possible. Still, even on the basis of the short descriptions available, Aponte’s image emerges as a critical engagement with the news and visual representations then circulating in Havana. Aponte’s picture, he insisted to authorities, lauded the progress of commerce. Yet his own description of it suggested otherwise. (Ferrer 2014, 321)

8. But the story takes an even more historical turn with the inclusion in the same picture of a second large vessel, the warship San Lorenzo, about which Aponte was not asked and did not elaborate. READ MORE

   The real San Lorenzo had a long history in the Caribbean. During the war between Spain and France in 1793-5, it had been part of the Spanish squadron that led the naval siege on Saint-Domingue’s Fort-Dauphin, which gave Spanish forces control of Bayajá. After the siege, the San Lorenzo was one of the vessels that transported French prisoners of all colors to Cuba. In December 1795, it transported the remains of Christopher Columbus to Havana. On that same trip, it carried the former slave and then general Georges Biassou and other black auxiliaries and their families to Havana after Spain’s defeat in Santo Domingo. Indeed, Aponte drew the vessel near Casa Blanca, where the black auxiliaries had stayed in 1795 and again in 1811-12. Later, as news of the Almirantazgo arrived and as Aponte began his book, the San Lorenzo was normally in Havana harbor, cruising within sight of the port. In 1810, it was in Cádiz, transporting French prisoners, and briefly under consideration as the mode of transportation for black auxiliaries returning to Santo Domingo via Havana. The San Lorenzo, then, carried a rich history, known to many in Havana.[105] Indeed, for some of the men involved in Aponte’s movement, the connection to the San Lorenzo was much more personal. It was on that very vessel that some members of the black militia who conspired with Aponte had done guard duty. The creole black militiaman José del Carmen Peñalver, who was centrally involved in the planning of the conspiracy and who wrote the forged passes that Barbier and Lisundia used to go the countryside on March 14 to begin the rebellion, had served on the San Lorenzo when it was in Havana. Another free black militia member, Hilario Santa Cruz, who played an unknown role in the conspiracy but served a four-year sentence as a result of the investigation, also testified that he had served aboard the San Lorenzo.[106] With this history and association in mind, the picture that Aponte described as an allegory about the progress of commerce emerges as something much more complex. Death met those associated with Spanish commerce, perhaps including the slave trade, while in another part of the picture, the San Lorenzo — a ship that had spent time in revolutionary Saint-Domingue, that had brought decorated black heroes from the Haitian Revolution to Havana, and on which some of Aponte’s own companions had served — stood impervious to harm. Here, then, was a trace of an alternative allegory. Aponte’s testimony to authorities rendered that element of the drawing faint and elusive, buried, like so many other pictures in the volume, not just by the subsequent loss of the book but also by Aponte himself, by his strategic evasions and deflections, by the disavowals he himself was forced to effect in the courtroom.[107] But in another context, before a different audience, the picture would easily have recalled the men’s own memories and experiences aboard a vessel with so much history relevant to their own. (Ferrer 2014, 322-323)

9. Then there are a number of ships lying at anchor in the bay of Havana, the geographic features of the bay being depicted in realistic detail. READ MORE

   Yet—at least this is what Aponte explains to Nerey and his scribe—at the entrance of the port personifications of Avarice and Death are seen jumping on land from a launch sent by the first ship to enter the harbor. (Palmié 2002, 105)

10. Based on this and other elements of the image, authorities were openly skeptical of Aponte’s claim that the picture celebrated commerce. READ MORE

    How, they asked, could the picture be about the progress of commerce when death is figured so prominently and even holds the caduceo in its hand? Death, Aponte countered, destroys only avarice, not commerce. Authorities appear to have taken him at his word, failing to note other inconsistencies. Death appeared in the picture twice, both times associated with Spanish shipping or Spanish commerce. The first time it defeated the guarda del comercio in charge of stopping contraband; the second time (with the commerce staff in its hand), death met “avarice” as the latter landed on the dock from a Spanish vessel. Did Aponte mean to depict the death of Spanish commerce, or perhaps of a particular Spanish commerce? Importantly, Aponte’s picture included “un negro” pictured near the Spanish ship. That is all he says about the figure, and authorities did not ask him about it. Was he a sailor, a slave, a militia member? We cannot know. But it is perhaps important that the figure is the only one associated with the Spanish ship who did not encounter death. Whether death killed avarice or commerce, he spared the black man. The allegory, then, was perhaps less about commerce in general than about the commerce in black men and women: the commerce was destroyed, the people not — a fitting image for the age that saw the beginning of England’s naval campaign against the slave trade. (Ferrer 2014, 321-322)

11. Nerey, at this point, obviously disagrees with Aponte’s explanation. Why is it, he asks, that the personification of Death carries the caduceus in his hand? READ MORE

    Aponte’s rather curt answer may betray a lie or, possibly, an indirection. Death destroys only Avarice, he retorts, thus ostensibly exempting Trade, but perhaps obliquely commenting on the moral legitimacy of a regime of bureaucrats serving the interests of sugar planters (“señores de ingenio”) and their purveyors of human chattel. Aponte obviously could not have had a clear idea of the quantitative dimensions of the slave trade to Cuba. Yet, one might add with hind- sight, the fact that more than sixty-three hundred African slaves entered Havana’s harbor in 1811 alone—an average of more than five hundred a month—(Marrero 1971–88, 9:35) may have helped shape his opinion on such matters. (Palmié 2002, 105)