Black Childhood and Sexual Assault in Cuban Slave Society: The Case of Juan Francisco Manzano

ABSTRACT Extensive historical documentation from Brazil and some limited, but compelling primary sources from the United States and the Caribbean, describe the rape of enslaved adolescent males. Manzano's adolescent experience—as detailed in his autobiography—is no exception to the rule. I contend that Manzano's presence within the big house should not be read as the conferral of racial privilege—as is often the tendency among scholars—but rather be examined as false intimacy, which was weaponized to his detriment. I submit that the second mistress raped the young Manzano by proxy to obstruct his intellectual development and prevent the psychological maturation and physical threat associated with manhood. Juan Francisco did not labor in the sugar cane fields in Matanzas so his domestic labor was not critical to the island's largest export crop. As such, he represented a superfluous and dangerous presence in the big house. Cuban slave society reduced him to what Tommy Curry calls a “phobic entity” marked for extermination ( The Man Not , 147). Manzano's autobiography is an account of personal calamities and—as I have argued elsewhere—a camouflaged portrayal of his Catholic and African transculturated belief structure (See Cuban Literature in the Age of Black insurrection: Manzano, Plácido and Afro‐Latino Religion by Matthew Pettway and “En honor a Elegguá: Máscaras y trampas trazando los caminos de Juan Francisco Manzano” a dissertation by Carmen Luz Cosme Puntiel.). But it is also a humane portrait of African‐descended male personhood where the author engages ambiguity, subtlety, and misdirection to divulge that shameful secret even while shielding himself from the voyeuristic gaze of his white readership.