Anselmo Suárez y Romero
| Anselmo Suárez y Romero | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1818 |
| Died | 1882 |
| Nationality | Cuba |
| Literary movement | Romanticism |
| Notable works | Francisco: el ingenio o las delicias del campo. |
Anselmo Suárez y Romero (1818–1878) was a renowned Cuban writer and novelist, better known for the first novel about slavery in the Americas: Francisco.
Suárez y Romero was educated in his native city, where he devoted himself to teaching and contributing to public education.
Anselmo Suárez y Romero's masterpiece: Francisco, also known as El ingenio o las delicias del campo ([The sugar mill or the delights of the country] error: {{lang-xx}}: text has italic markup (help)), written between 1838 and 1839, is considered the first anti-slavery novel in the Americas. The other work which encompassed slavery, was the short story Petrona y Rosalía written in 1838 by Félix Tanco y Bosmeniel (1797–1871), unpublished until 1925, which also touched upon slaves' lives in the 19th century.
Based largely on accounts from "Autobiografía de un esclavo", the autobiography written by Juan Francisco Manzano years before, and which was published later in England, the novel Francisco set out the way for other literary works to follow: Cecilia Valdés by Cirilo Villaverde began in 1839, Sab by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda in 1841, El Ranchador by Pedro José Morillas in 1856, Antonio Zambrana's El negro Francisco in 1873, and Alejo Carpentier's ¡Ecué-Yambá! in 1933.
Written years before Uncle Tom's Cabin, Francisco could not be published immediately due to colonial censorship. The manuscript was delivered to British official and abolitionist Richard Robert Madden in 1840, along with a revised copy of the work Autobiografía de un esclavo (English: Autobiography of a slave) by Juan Francisco Manzano, which had been proofread by Suárez y Romero himself.
About the importance of Francisco as a literary masterpiece, British abolitionist Madden was quoted as saying that:
Tho there is literary merit of but small amount in this piece, there is life and truth in every line of it. [...] In this little piece of the Ingenio there is a minuteness of description and closeness of observation and a rightness of feeling that I have not often seen surpassed.
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