u 3

Picturing Cuba: Romantic Ecology in Gómez de

Avellaneda’s Sab (1841)

Adriana Méndez Rodenas

As the bay of Santiago de Cuba receded from view, a young Gertrudis Gómez
de Avellaneda penned her most famous sonnet, “Al partir,” to commemorate
her departure from Cuba on April 9, 1836 (Antología poética 29). At the start
of a long sea-crossing to Spain, the lyrical subject of “Al partir” voices an
emotive farewell echoed among generations of Cubans who live outside the
island. In much the same way as her precursor, poet José María Heredia, the
first to view his country from afar, Gómez de Avellaneda recalls the sounds
and sites of her native island precisely at the point when these beloved places
begin to fade from view. Rather than glimpse the palms of her native island
amidst the waterfalls, as Heredia had done in the memorable verses of “Oda
al Niágara,” Gómez de Avellaneda pictures Cuba as “an edén querido” (29)
(an endearing paradise), recreating the essence and ambience of the island
in a timeless present. Inscribed on the insular imaginary since Columbus’s
Diary, this Edenic trope marks the location (or dislocation) of the lyrical sub-
ject as she anticipates her distance from the privileged place of origin: “Do
quier que el hado en su furor me impele / tu dulce nombre halagará mi oído”
(Antología poética 29) (no matter where blind fate leads me, your sweet name
will always delight my ear). For Severo Sarduy, a contemporary Cuban writer
also born in Camagüey, “Al partir” shifts the poem’s register from the visual
to the auditive, since the absence from the island is ciphered by the acoustic
trace it left behind (20). For Sarduy, the movement from the visual to the au-
ditive marks, in his view, Gómez de Avellaneda’s unique contribution to the
discourse of nationhood (20).1
Gómez de Avellaneda’s coming-of-age in Camagüey, in the interior of the
island, and her subsequent literary fame in Seville and Madrid make her both
a transnational Cuban writer as well as a model of transatlantic Romanticism.

Gender and the Politics of Literature: Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda

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Perhaps in imitation of Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Gómez de

Avellaneda dubs herself “la peregrina” (the pilgrim), a self-fashioning sur-
facing behind the lyrical “I” of “Al partir” caught between two seas in the
passage from the Caribbean to the Atlantic.2
Although Gómez de Avellaneda’s literary career straddles Cuba and
Spain, her first novel is thematically aligned with the anti-slavery novels
written by members of the Del Monte circle, a literary salon that gathered in
Havana beginning in 1835. It was under Del Monte’s leadership and within
the chambers of this august tertulia (literary salon) that Cuban literature got
its start. Works like Anselmo Suárez y Romero’s Francisco o las delicias del
campo (1839) and Félix Tanco’s “Escenas de la vida privada en la isla de
Cuba” (1925) hinge, like Sab, on racial desire: vengeful masters who prey on
female domestic slaves use their class and racial privilege to force them into
submission. In contrast, Gómez de Avellaneda shifts gender and dares to show
a slave in love with his white mistress, thrusting the violence of colonialism
and slavery onto the shoulders of a long-suffering “noble slave.” In picturing
a cultured, spiritually evolved, and racially mixed slave, the young expatriate
went beyond Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés (1882), whose mulata pro-
tagonist, in love with her white half-brother, becomes the symbol of Cuban
nationality. By reverting the prevailing code of anti-slavery narrative, and
introducing a miscegenated Sab as an icon of Cuban nationality, Gómez de
Avellaneda shows the “desire for the nation” as well as the “desire for racial
integration” prevalent in Caribbean literature (Benítez Rojo, “Power/Sugar/
Literature” 26–28, 35). Yet Gómez de Avellaneda is often excluded from the
anti-slavery tradition for the simple fact that she did not live in Cuba (Luis
4–5); moreover, her use of a Romantic aesthetic rather than the Balzacian
high realism promoted by Del Monte is often misunderstood as countering the
fledging writers’ efforts to denounce slavery under oppressive conditions.3 As
the first anti-slavery novel in the Americas, Sab is linked to a broader conti-
nental network of female-authored abolitionist narrative that fostered a sense
of the African’s human dignity ([2001] 16–17).
As a transnational Cuban writer, Gómez de Avellaneda is aligned with a
pair of foreign artists—the Spaniard Víctor Landaluze and the French Frédéric
Miahle—whose colorful sketches of the streets of Havana are filled with plazas,
paseos (promenades), theaters, market-places, and public spaces where emerg-
ing national subjects appear framed within the pictorial conventions of the
picturesque. But whereas Landaluze and Miahle provide an urban topography,
Gómez de Avellaneda turns her gaze to the interior of Cuba, to the geographic
center of the island, where the natural beauty of the land provides an idyllic
setting for the emergence of creole (criollo) values; as we shall see, the fictional
Bellavista plantation is also the perfect setting for a tale of unrequited love.
Sab has appealed to countless generations of readers by its racially tinged

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romance. Among its most salient features, critics have noted the novel’s “pa-
limpsest” effect, the way it voices a resistance to slavery while denouncing
women’s submissive condition under patriarchy.4 The novel links women and
slaves by their shared, if differently weighed, double condition of bondage,
hence articulating the connection between patriarchy and colonialism. Critics
have also emphasized the overlapping of two passionate triangles to weave
the sentimental plot of the novel (Kirkpatrick 147): Sab and Enrique are rivals
for the love of Carlota, and both Carlota and her adopted sister Teresa make
the hapless Enrique their one obsessive choice. As the plot unfolds, the male
characters contradict readerly expectations regarding gender and race. En-
rique Otway, son of a British merchant and a white Anglo-Saxon, is depicted
as a “dark” or “inferior” soul, while Sab, who is hinted to be the illegitimate
son of Don Luis, his master’s brother, is racially black, yet he appears as “ele-
vated” and “noble,” the embodiment of a “superior” spirit ([1973] 126, 133).5
The two rivals for Carlota’s affection are at two extremes not only in terms of
race, but, most importantly, in terms of ethical temperament; whereas Enrique
is steeped in crass materiality, Sab is capable of altruistic sacrifice for the
object of his love. The two female figures are similarly opposed, as Teresa’s
cold reserve and serious demeanor is countered by Carlota’s overly affective
temperament, vulnerability, and impetuousness.6 Although Sab clearly stands
out as Romantic hero, all four main characters participate in Romantic subjec-
tivity to the extent of their involvement in the ethos and pathos of love.
Still eliciting fresh readings after two-hundred years, I want to focus on
the role played by tropical nature in the novel, a topic that has gone largely
unnoticed.7 Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab constructs a “spatial imaginary,” a
way of picturing Cuba as “edén querido” (beloved Eden), an idyllic trope
that depicts the island—and particularly, the interior of the island, its geo-
graphic center—as Edenic landscape. In this visual imagination, the region
of “Cubitas” functions as metonymy of nation: “little Cuba,” a region not yet
obliterated by the onslaught of large sugar manufacture that riddled the west-
ern provinces—the main sugar-producing regions of Havana and Matanzas.
Its pristine landscape signals a warning to the ravaging of island ecology by
“Cuba grande” (big Cuba), “the Cuba of the slave compound” and mecha-
nized sugar mills (Benítez Rojo, “Power/Sugar/Literature” 15–16) while, at
the same time, mourning for a lost Eden on the verge of disappearance.
I examine the way the novel shapes a “spatial imagination” or an imagi-
nation of space that foregrounds “the experience of place” in Caribbean liter-
ature (DeLoughrey and Handley 4). Geographically distant from the colonial
hub in Havana but pictured as the island’s symbolic core, the source of its
material and spiritual riches, the privileged space of Cubitas and its envi-
rons is mapped in the feminine. Lyrical evocations of two distinct tropical
ecologies—garden and cave—and a recurrent natural phenomena, the tropical

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tempest—help to produce a distinct sense of place. The accent on nature, so

central to Romanticism, enables Gómez de Avellaneda to elucidate her own
sense of dislocation, her ability to move between two worlds. Her Romantic
ecology figures a detached and an engaged perspective, as if the novel was
written with both a criollo and a peninsular audience in mind. At the same
time, Gómez de Avellaneda’s spatial imagination contributes to a broader
transamerican sensibility, as seen in her poem “El viajero americano,” a coded
response to Heredia’s “Oda al Niágara.”

Picturing Cuba:
The Spatial Imagination and the Sugar Plantation

By its focus on the interior of the island and its bucolic descriptions of land-
scape, Sab manifests the “desire for the nation” permeating nineteenth-century
Spanish American narrative. In Jorge Isaacs’s María (1867), set in a simi-
lar idyllic landscape, the Valle del Cauca in Colombia, the bountiful scenery
of the valley is associated with the dark beauty of its female protagonist, a
technique also followed here in the equivalence between Carlota and insular
landscape (quoted in Brickhouse 174). By continually voicing a preference
for the pastoral, Carlota waxes nostalgia for a pre-conquest mode of life as-
sociated with the island’s first inhabitants, the taínos (203). However, in con-
trast to Isaacs, Gómez de Avellaneda shifts gender and has Sab, a mulatto
slave, appear within the lush landscape surrounding the Bellavista plantation.
Although not as heavily accented as in Isaacs, the “feminization of land” be-
comes a primary trope for the representation of landscape, particularly in lat-
er passages, when Sab eulogizes his passion for Carlota in terms of sensing
her presence in every element of nature (245). The excess of tropical nature
conditions and ultimately determines the outcome of romantic passion, while
linking in to a broader reflection on nation.
Gómez de Avellaneda articulates a vision of the natural world that is not
merely the backdrop where the lovers play out their respective roles, but is rath-
er woven into the texture of the novel as the raison d’être of romantic passion.
It is the exuberance of their natural surroundings that propels Sab and Carlota’s
capacity for love, what makes them prototypical Romantic subjects and ulti-
mately determines their tragic end (146). As she would do in her later poem, “El
viajero americano,” the author dons the mask of a traveler who is about to em-
bark on a journey “por un país pintoresco y magnífico” ([1999] 148) (“a colorful
and magnificent country” [Sab, Scott 59]) in company of her beloved: “La natu-
raleza se embellece con la presencia del objeto que se ama y éste se embellece
con la naturaleza” (179–180) (“Nature becomes more beautiful in the presence

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of the beloved and this person in turn is embellished by nature” [Sab, Scott 59]).
Hand-in-hand with an impersonal viajero (traveler) who surveys the land
for the first time, the reader enters the space surrounding Puerto Príncipe
through the lens of a fictional travelogue, stopping “[para] admirar más [ . . . ]
los campos fertilísimos de aquel país privilegiado” (132) (to “admire the fuller
savoring of the richly fertile earth of that privileged country” [Sab, Scott, 27]).
Later identified as Enrique (132), the viajero’s interest in the landscape is pri-
marily economic, to foster cultivation of the verdant, “fertile” plains. By em-
phasizing a newly “discovered” terrain, the narrator’s prospect view re-enacts
Columbus’s legacy as well the inquisitive gaze of Enlightenment explorers,
who detached themselves from the land in order to conquer it: Columbus, for
the Spanish empire; Humboldt and later explorers, for the interests of science.
The spatial imagination traced of the “Cubitas” region falls within the
picturesque iconography prevalent in nineteenth-century Spanish American
narrative, as in Isaacs’s depiction of the valley of Cauca in María. Anticipat-
ing Cirilo Villaverde’s description of the Vuelta Abajo coffee plantation in
Cecilia Valdés, Gómez de Avellaneda displays the Bellavista plantation as ob-
ject of contemplation and idyllic landscape: “El sol terrible de la zona tórrida
se acercaba a su ocaso [. . .] y sus últimos rayos [. . .] vestían de un colorido
melancólico los campos vírgenes de aquella hermosa naturaleza [. . .].” (132)
(“The brutal sun of the torrid zone was sinking into dusk [. . .] and its last
rays [. . .] bathed the virgin fields of that youthful nature in melancholy hues”
[Scott, Sab 27]). From the start, Gómez de Avellaneda views the tropics as a
space tinged with melancholy, a sentiment meant to anticipate the effects of
deforestation that were already noticeable in 1838–1840, the period in which
the action takes place (editor’s notes, Cruz 321).
Enlightenment explorers had endowed the tropics with a peculiar aura,
setting it apart from what they perceived was a “tamed” or domesticated na-
ture in Europe (Stepan 15–17). It was the profusion of plants, the abundance
and “hyperfertility” of plant life, and its perpetual verdure, that set the tropics
apart as a region distinct from Europe (36). Here the reference to a “vigorosa y
lozana vegetación” (Gómez de Avellaneda 132) (“vigorous and luxuriant veg-
etation” [Sab, Scott, 27]) echoes the way Enlightenment explorers perceived
the impact of tropical vegetation; the most noticeable example is Humboldt,
who, at first glance of the forests near Cumaná, had noted the sublimity as-
sociated with the tropical zone. An echo of the way that explorers from La
Condamine to Humboldt describe the dense canopy of trees in the Amazon
rain forest—a “forêt vierge” personified as a feminized though impenetra-
ble space—surfaces subliminally here as “las copas frondosas de los árboles
agostados por el calor del día” (132) (“the leafy crowns of the trees, parched
by the day’s heat” [Sab, Scott, 27]). The accent on vegetation suggests the
exoticizing of land from an “outside” or detached perspective, that signals

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Gómez de Avellaneda’s wish to engage a European reader unfamiliar with

New World scenery.
To give us a first glimpse of “Cubitas,” Gómez de Avellaneda draws on
the archive of scientific travel writing, enumerating the varieties of tropical
flora and fauna found in her native region. Birds and flowers are listed in
a manner that recalls taxonomic categories used in European travel writing.
Yet, true to a Romantic ecology, the author soon turns this detached view into
an intimate encounter with nature.8 The reader gleans the expatriate writer’s
desire for pertenencia or belonging to an insular community in her subsequent
enumeration of birds and trees. She poetically evokes a list of “native” species
familiar to a local subject: “El verde papagayo [. . .], el cao de un negro nítido
[. . .], el carpintero real [. . .], la alegre guacamaya, el ligero tomeguín [. . .]
y otra infinidad de aves indígenas, posaban en las ramas del tamarindo y del
mango aromático” (132) (“The green parrot [. . .], the crow, distinctively black
and lustrous, the royal woodpecker [. . .], the blithe macaw, the swift tomeguín
[. . .] and a whole host of native birds alighted in the branches of tamarind and
aromatic mango trees” [Sab, Scott, 27]). All of these birds are species native
to Cuba; moreover, these living species are identified by their local, regional,
and even indigenous names, rather than by the Latin [Linnean] nomenclature
of European science. Hence the description privileges local knowledge over
“universal” categories, emphasizing a deeply rooted sense of place. The use of
American toponymy reinforces the narrator’s authenticity, while, at the same
time, the editorial notes identifying local species nod to a foreign reader who
has never set foot on the tropics. For example, Mary Cruz explains that “la
tornasolada mariposa” (“the iridescent butterfly” [Sab, Scott, 27]) is not a but-
terfly, as a peninsular reader would expect, but rather “a very small [red and
green] bird, common in Cuba” (322).
Since the start of the narrative, the trope of travel unveils the imagination
of space, in the sense that both reader and the unsuspecting traveler come to
experience insular nature from both near and afar. How to reconcile these two
perspectives? On the one hand, the spatial imagination in Sab is structured by a
similar set of contradictions that build the characters’ subjectivity; on the other,
picturing insular landscape circumscribes a particular region, affirming regional
identity, in contrast to the colonial and commercial center located in Havana.
Soon after the initial framing of landscape, appears Sab, a perfect blend
between African and European races—he is, in Gómez de Avellaneda’s mem-
orable phrase, “un mulato perfecto” (133) (“a perfect mulatto” [Sab, Scott,
28]). In attempting to solve the “enigma” of his name, Mary Cruz conjectures
that it refers to a banished tribe in the Congo; indeed, the author may have
first heard the name from a Congo mother who used it to refer to her mula-
to offspring, branding, not unfavorably, the child’s physique and color (Cruz
64–65). Contrary to critics’ perplexity regarding the protagonist’s “racial in-

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definiteness” (Sommer 118), Sab’s status as miscegenated national subject

is meant to illustrate the prototype of an emerging Cuban nationality. This is
why Gómez de Avellaneda belabors the description of his physical appearance
(exterior) as well as the inner drive that is to characterize his later actions.9
Clearly, Sab marks the “desire for racial integration” (Benítez, “Power/Sugar/
Literature” 26) evident in Caribbean culture as a theater where indigenous,
African, and European races play out their respective roles in a series of con-
tinuous migratory flows.
Sab functions as mayoral (overseer) in Don Carlos’s plantation, which
introduces the economic underside of Romantic ecology: the sugar mill as site
of production. In response to the viajero recently arrived at the scene, Enrique
Otway, his rival for Carlota’s affection, Sab gives crucial facts regarding the
size, extent, and purpose of the land: “Tiempo ha habido [. . .] en que este
ingenio daba a su dueño doce mil arrobas de azúcar cada año, porque entonc-
es más de cien negros trabajaban en sus cañaverales” (135) (“there has been
times [. . .] when this plantation produced for its owner some three hundred
thousand pounds of sugar every year, because then over more than a hundred
blacks worked in the cane fields” [Sab, Scott 29]). A landscape of apparent
prosperity soon gives way to inminent decline: “pero los tiempos han variado
y el propietario actual de Bellavista no tiene en él sino cincuenta negros, ni
excede su zafra de seis mil panes de azúcar” (135) (“But times have changed,
and since the present owner of Bellavista has only fifty blacks, his production
does not exceed six thousand loaves of sugar” [Sab, Scott 29]). From this
description, we learn that Don Carlos owns the prototype of ingenio common
in Cuba between the late eighteenth-century and 1815, a year that marked
the rapid turn toward industrialization propelling the unprecedented growth
of sugar manufacture at mid-nineteenth-century (Funes Monzote 43–44).
Indeed, the Bellavista fits the characteristics of this earlier phase of sugar
production almost exactly, given its relatively small size, reduced though en-
slaved labor force, and average yield of roughly ten thousand arrobas.
Sab’s testimony proves, however, that the size of the ingenio (sugar fac-
tory) does not affect the slaves, who are subject to constant exploitation: “Es
una vida terrible a la verdad [. . .]. Bajo este cielo de fuego el esclavo casi
desnudo trabaja toda la mañana sin descanso” (135) (“It is truly a terrible life.
[. . .] Under this fiery sky the nearly naked slave works all morning without
a rest” [Scott, Sab 29]), enjoying only a small pause over the noon hour. The
three phases of sugar production are synthesized here: the cutting of sugar
cane in the fields, the grinding of the stalks in trapiches or oxen-powered
grinders to extract the juice, then the hot boilers where the melaza or fer-
mented cane juice evaporates into crystal. In a few brief lines, Sab conveys
not only the intense manual labor required in producing sugar, but also its
detrimental effects on the slaves, noting the fact that they were only allowed

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two hours of sleep, what necessarily altered the sequence of day and night
(135). By means of metaphor—the “fuego del sol” (136) (fiery rays of sun)
burning the backs of sugar-cane cutters turns into the “fuego de leña” (136)
(“the heat of firewood” [Scott 29]) inside the sugar mill—field and factory are
linked in the process of sugar production. We see the cauldron that caused the
cane-juice to boil, and how the slaves had to patiently toil, stirring the liquid
long hours and under exceedingly hot temperatures. Seen in terms of an en-
vironmental history of Cuba, this eloquent passage illustrates the reliance on
wood as fuel for the sugar industry (Funes Monzote 50, 55). Historian Funes
Monzote asserts in From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba that “wood [was]
an important element in building of ingenios,” as everything—from buildings
to trapiches—was made out of wood (49–50).10
This graphic image of the interior of the sugar mill leads to an abstract
statement regarding slave labor: “es un cruel espectáculo la vista de la hu-
manidad degradada, de hombres convertidos en brutos, que llevan en su frente
la marca de la esclavitud y en su alma la desesperación del infierno” (136)
(“The sight of this degraded humanity, where men become mere brutes, is a
cruel spectacle. These are men whose brows are seared with the mark of slav-
ery just as their souls are branded with the desperation of Hell” [Sab, Scott,
29–30]). Sab’s lament for insular nature is aligned with a broader “yearning
for lost landscapes” in Caribbean literature, a response to the large-scale de-
forestation that resulted from the expansion of the sugar industry, beginning
with the “Great Clearing” during the mid-seventeenth century that turned the
British and French Caribbean into “sugar islands,” and culminating two cen-
turies later in the technological innovations that depleted wooded areas in the
Hispanic Caribbean (Paravisini Gebert 99–116). Although, historically, the
landscape surrounding Puerto Príncipe had not yet been totally absorbed by
plantation economy (131), Gómez de Avellaneda prefigures its later demise.
Central to Gómez de Avellaneda’s Romantic ecology is a striking contrast
between the natural world and the social order, what serves as a powerful dis-
claimer of the institution of slavery and a warning of what is to come.
Bellavista was, then, one of many small sugar mills prevalent in Cuba
before the “boom” in the industry which occurred after 1830, a consequence
of the 1791 revolution in Haiti and the collapse of the plantation system in
the French island (Funes Monzote, From Rainforest to Canefield 83; Moreno
Fraginals 22–23, 27). Led by its intellectual author, Francisco Arango y Par-
reño, the Havana oligarchy soon “won the backing of colonial authorities,”
creating a united front in order “to modernize the colony and develop it eco-
nomically,” envisioning post-Enlightenment progress and prosperity under
the code-name “la felicidad” (Funes Monzote 84) (progress and prosperity).
But, “la felicidad” was not shared by all members of the Creole aristocracy.
Like many other small landowners, Gómez de Avellaneda’s fictional Don

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Carlos had not prospered under the 1830’s sugar boom. On the contrary, he
had suffered a significant loss of land; a loss due, as Sab hints in his initial
exchange with Enrique, due to mounting economic pressures occasioned by
the rapid expansion of sugar (136).
Don Carlos’s Bellavista plantation is situated in the heart of “Cuba
pequeña” (Little Cuba) (Benítez Rojo, “Power/Sugar/Literature” 15), based
on small farms, diversified crops, and run by free workers (Funes Monzote
86), an agricultural system more attuned with “nature’s economy.”11 Sab’s
ambivalent status as a slave, but one who enjoyed special privilege and protec-
tion, is explained, in part, by the fact that Don Carlos’s plantation functioned
according to an earlier mode of production (159). By the 1830s sugar boom,
pasture lands and smaller landholdings were already on the verge of decline,
swept away by “Cuba grande” (Big Cuba) based on a single crop and requir-
ing “[large], slaveholding plantations” (Funes Monzote 86). In fact, since the
1830s, the sugar industry was rapidly expanding south, around Matanzas and
Trinidad, and invading the “red, fertile soil” of Artemisa Plain, and east to
Güines, an area of “’healthy, fertile, and lovely” plains, surrounded by a river
and dotted with small farms—the epitome of “Cuba pequeña” (Funes Mon-
zote 84, 87–88; Moreno Fraginals 22).
Equidistant from “Cubitas” and the city of Puerto Príncipe (131), and
bathed by the waters of the Tínima, the Bellavista plantation lies next to the
fertile “tierras rojas” coveted by the big sugar plantations (131). Bellavista
is thus under the threat of “Cuba grande,” which required an ever wider ex-
tension of land, the clearing away of large tracts of forest for planting sugar
cane, and an ever constant supply of slaves. This explains why the landscape
is tainted by “melancholy,” which colors the organization of landscape, its
absorption into a social order. By praising the natural beauty of the island
in these opening scenes, Gómez de Avellaneda voices the “yearning for lost
landscapes” (Paravisini Gebert 99), an aesthetic response to deforestation
prevalent in Caribbean fiction.
Enlightenment explorer Alexander von Humboldt had already noted the
effect which the European “lust for the land” had in American territories; in
Cuba particularly, he had “warned about the lack of subsistence crops that
characterized many of the tropical regions owing to ‘the imprudent activity of
Europeans, which has turned the order of nature on its head’” (qtd. in Funes
Monzote 86). Humboldt’s prophetic statement explains Gómez de Avellane-
da’s scathing critique of the British as embodied in the Otways. For it was the
British who had first introduced the máquina de vapor (steam engine) into
the sugar mill, facilitating the transition from “primitive” ingenios like the
Bellavista, pulled by oxen, to the semi-mechanized sugar mill, run entirely by
machines (the steam engine) (Funes Monzote 129; Moreno Fraginals 32–33,
102). In an intermediate stage in sugar production, the semi-mechanized sugar

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mill would soon turn into the big factoría, associated with the rise of “Cuba
grande,” a technological shift that prompted the expansion of the industry into
the heartland of Cuba, to the east, “the plains of the Central District,” mainly,
in Cienfuegos, Santa Clara, and Sancti Spiritus (Funes Monzote 129, 131).12
Don Carlos’s loss of fortune is, in part, due to this expansion of the big fac-
toría in the eastern region, whose ravaging effect on the ecology of the island
is denounced in Gómez de Avellaneda’s novel (Benítez Rojo, “Power/Sugar/
Literature” 35). Sab comes to embody the values of a traditional creole culture
associated with “Little Cuba,” more so than the “soft-hearted,” and somewhat
weak, creole land owner, Don Carlos. In her prologue, Gómez de Avellaneda
declares that she let the novel sit for over three years (127); assuming, as
her biographers do, that she wrote it between 1836 and 1838; that is, in tran-
sit between Bordeaux and Seville (Servera 46), the author would have been
aware of the impending “savannization” of her native region due to the impact
of large-scale sugar manufacture, which would increase over the 1840s and
1860s (Funes Monzote 131; Moreno Fraginals 65–70). The novel appeared in
Madrid in 1841, as if to alert, if not prevent, the region’s ecological demise.
By the 1860s, when Justo Germán Cantero had published Los Ingenios de
Cuba, sugar giants had transformed the topography of the island, as towers and
smoke stacks loomed over previously wooded territory. Intended as a showcase
and aesthetic justification for large-scale sugar production, the beautiful illus-
trations in Cantero’s series conceal the steam-engine’s negative effect on the
ecology (Cantero, “Ingenio la Amistad”). “Steam’s impact on the environment
[. . .] was characterized first by an increased need for fuel and later by an ex-
pansion of the surface area of the cane fields” (Funes Monzote 129). Near the
island’s geographic center, steam-powered ingenios (sugar factories) were less
common than in the heavily industrialized western region, but the average size
of the ingenios remained the same.13
The apex of sugar production in Cuba came with the introduction of boil-
er houses or trenes al vacío (Jamaican sugar kettle batteries), which ushered
the rise of the big factoría or “mechanized sugar mill” (Funes Monzote). Of
the twenty-five illustrations included in Los ingenios, half were mechanized
“with an average area of 86 caballerías” (Funes Monzote 131), a noticeable
difference from both the steam-run plantations and the earlier, Bellavista-type
ingenios (Cantero, “Interior of Boiler House, Ingenio Santa Susana”). In fact,
“this new type of sugar mill reconfigured the technical and spatial organi-
zation of the industry compared with its traditional forms during the early
nineteenth century” (Funes Monzote 131). Cantero’s illustrations of the sug-
ar-mill, featuring “the three main buildings of the ingenio—the casa de mo-
lienda (pressing house), casa de calderas (boiler house), and casa de purga
(purging house), where the sugar was separated from the molasses”—hide
the fact that all “were constructed from lumber” (Funes Monzote 49). The

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open fields in seeming harmony with the buildings of the batey, along with
the church tower, whose bell marked the rhythm of work for the slaves, gloss
over the hard truth that “deforestation occurred in every region of the island”
(Funes Monzote 131; Cantero, “Ingenio Manaca”).
Alarmed that the same was about to occur in her beloved Puerto Príncipe,
Gómez de Avellaneda focuses her resistance to sugar on the Otways, who
represent foreigners’ ability to profit from an immensely fertile land, what
is facilitated by the locals’ more relaxed attitude to matters of “agriculture,
commerce, and industry” (149).14 Gómez de Avellaneda’s caricature of the
eldest Otway may have deeper historical roots: his obscure origins in piracy
may allude to British pirate attacks in late seventeenth-century Caribbean;
concretely, to Henry Morgan’s raid of Puerto Príncipe in 1668, when he pil-
laged the villa in return for ransom money (Marrero 137–140).15 Jorge Otway
had succeeded in commerce to such an extent that his dearest ambition was
to become, like the most opulent of criollos (creoles), a slave owner himself
(150). This was tantamount to a foreign “invasion” of the city’s criollo-con-
trolled economy; hence, a threat to the city’s Mediterranean traditions and
values (Moreno Fraginals 69; Levi Marrero 60). To make inroads in a society
that would have ordinarily been off limits, the elder Otway plots to have En-
rique marry the daughter of the richest creole aristocrat, a hope dashed by Don
Carlos’s sudden loss of fortune (153–155).16 In short, the author’s scathing
critique of the Otways is due to their association with foreign interests, the
same that fueled the rise of “Cuba grande” (big Cuba), associated with global
markets, authoritarian power, and the loss of the island’s lush forests (Benítez
Rojo 35; “Power/Sugar/Literature” 15). Read as allegory, Carlota’s doomed
marriage to Otway warns against a mercantilist hold on the nation.
The novel stages the contrast between “Little Cuba” and “Big Cuba” in
terms of a romantic rivalry between “creole” and foreigner: Enrique Otway
and the prototypical Sab. Eager to rush back to Puerto Príncipe to attend to
his father’s business, Enrique is not persuaded by the family’s pleas to wait
until after an impending storm passes (162). Instructed by Don Carlos to ac-
company Enrique, Sab wavers whether to let Enrique perish or save his life,
as the storm had, predictably, caused Enrique to be thrown off his horse by
a thunderbolt (167). In a scene bathed in “pathetic fallacy where nature is
subordinated to the [character’s] self” (Bate 77), Sab decides to rescue En-
rique, but only because Carlota had entrusted him with his safety (167–169).
The tempest stages Gómez de Avellaneda’s romantic ecology, pitting two op-
posing attitudes toward the natural world as an effective strategy for char-
acterization: the younger Otway is depicted as an “inferior” soul given his
reckless behavior, disregard for local knowledge, and crass material values;
in contrast, Sab and Carlota, respectively, are each endowed with “superior”
sensibilities (164; 168); despite the abyss of race, they are “loftier souls [. . .]

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rich in sentiment” (Sab, Scott, 48). Romantic ecology here underscores an-
ti-slavery sentiment, for, once the men arrive back at the plantation, Carlota
grants Sab his freedom (171).

Sab’s Garden and the Tropes of Romantic Ecology

Soon after the tempest scene, and reassured that her beloved is safe, Carlota
finds refuge in the garden (173). The garden trope recurs in European Roman-
ticism to signify the harmony between the natural and social worlds, a domes-
ticated nature that has been carefully tended to bring out salient features of
the landscape, “beautifying” it as a visually pleasing, and sensually delightful,
site. Gómez de Avellaneda pictures the garden within a larger frame: “todo
el país [era] un vasto y magnífico vergel” (174) (“the entire country was a
vast and magnificent garden” [Sab, Scott, 56])—what not only reinforces the
Edenic trope configuring the tropics, but turns the garden into a metonymy
of nation. Moreover, the narrator stresses the difference between the tropical
garden and the continental tradition, for Sab’s garden, grown out of sentiment,
does not conform to French or English styles of “enclosed” or artificially land-
scaped gardens (174). While acknowledging the patterns of taste and sensibil-
ity which led to the rise of the institution of gardening in Europe—particularly
in the two countries associated with the Romantic movement, England and
France—Gómez de Avellaneda nods, once again, to a European public, who
had to be accommodated (acclimatized) to the virtues of Sab’s secluded spot
in the tropics. Like the garden in which Efraín and María exchange amorous
looks in Isaacs’s María (Operé 169), the garden Sab has carefully tended for
his beloved is a bucolic space set apart from the plantation’s sphere of influ-
ence. Framed by “triples hileras de altas cañas” (174) (“a triple row of tall
reeds” [Sab, Scott, 56])— a “wilder” yet related species of cane to the one
used in cultivation17—the sugar plantation looms sufficiently near so to dis-
rupt the idyll contained within its borders.
Sab’s garden displays a dazzling array of tropical flowers. Much like Sil-
vestre de Balboa’s epic poem Espejo de paciencia (1604), famous for its lyri-
cal cornucopia of flowers and fruits, the flowers blooming in Sab’s garden re-
veal “the desire for insular nature” that anticipates the “desire for the nation”
in nineteenth-century Latin America (Benítez Rojo, “Power/Sugar/Literature”
26–27).18 Paralleling the opening scene describing the Bellavista plantation,
the garden’s flora and fauna abound with native species: the emerald colibrí,
the “clavellina,” “malva rosa,” and pasionaria flowers are identified in the
author’s notes (175), following her earlier tactic of privileging local knowl-
edge over Linnean taxonomy. Sab’s garden, and the broader metonymy of

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nation implied in “un vasto y magnífico vergel” (174) (a vast and magnificent
garden), figures “Cuba pequeña” (little Cuba), located in the interior of the
island, dotted by small sugar plantations such as Don Carlos’s Bellavista.

The Caves or an Archeology of Space

Gómez de Avellaneda’s Romantic ecology shapes an imagination of space ac-

cording to specific topographic features and natural phenomena. The last in the
series is the family’s trip to “Cubitas,” a zone known for its spectacular cave
formations. En route to “Cubitas,” the landscape shifts from the evergreen
foliage that endows the tropics’ paradisiacal aura, to a more “somber” hue.
The underside of a Caribbean “spatial imaginary,” the caves uncover layers of
buried history, from pictographs drawn by unknown taíno hands, to a hidden
chamber that provided refuge to runaway slaves (207–209). As they approach
the caves, the group is greeted by a light that intermittently shines across their
path (199), suggesting a region immune to the expansion of sugar. Martina,
an indigenous wise-woman who lives alone in the midst of this “wilderness,”
and who is allegedly the last descendant of the cacique Camagüey, greets the
group and entertains them with her story-telling. As if to counter the erasure of
indigenous peoples from the map of the nation, Gómez de Avellaneda voices
through Martina a corrective view of Cuba’s colonial history. Substituting
oral memory for written record, Sab retells the legend that Martina had often
transmitted to him. At the first colonial encounter, Camagüey had greeted the
foreign invaders with gestures of good will; his kindness cruelly repaid when
the Spaniards exacted the ultimate vengeance by throwing Camagüey over a
cliff; the soil still reddened by his blood and sacrifice. The light that mysteri-
ously appears across the night sky is the cacique’s tormented soul who comes
to haunt his oppressors as a last act of defiance. Sab ends his soliloquy with a
prophetic vision in which the blacks promise to carry out the vengeance ex-
acted by their indigenous forebears (202).19 One of the few instances in which
Sab hints at open rebellion, this passage effectively links the disappearance
of Cuba’s indigenous population with the ecological devastation brought by
a plantation economy. That explains why Don Carlos’s party does not dare
step into the eleventh and deepest chamber of the cave—a refuge for runaway
slaves, the rock was also steeped in blood (208–09).
At the conclusion of the “Cubitas” scene, the family sits down to a ban-
quet where master and slave, man and woman, white and black, English and
creole, enjoy a communal feast in celebration of convivencia or mutually
shared bonds of sociability. For a brief epiphany, racial tensions are suspended
(219), upholding a “utopian project of co-existence to compensate for a frag-

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mented, unstable, and conflictive Antillean identity” (Benítez Rojo, La isla

que se repite 28). As we have seen, the bucolic landscape of “Cubitas”—“Cu-
ba pequeña” (little Cuba)—is the depository of autochthonous values; the site
of an authentic creole culture peopled by descendants of the original taínos
(Martina), Spanish immigrants, and Africans, a pastoral site where these di-
verse communities evolve with a strong sense of pertenencia or rootedness in
place (Benítez Rojo, “Power/Sugar/Literature” 15). The banquet scene antic-
ipates the transition to a broader sense of civitas or a communal way of life,
an echo of Silvestre de Balboa’s exultation of Bayamo in Espejo de paciencia.
The same utopian impulse surfaces toward the end of the novel, when
a broken-hearted Sab returns to Martina, on the eve of Carlota and Otway’s
marriage and before his own imminent end (281–286). In parallel fashion,
Carlota returns to Bellavista after her marriage, for nature offers her respite
and consolation from the disillusionment of finding herself tied to a man who
is ruled only by material values (302–304). In a poignant last scene, Carlota
mourns for Sab after Teresa reveals to her the contents of his letter, what
prompts her to return to the cherished landscape of “Cubitas” (306–307, 318).
Whereas before the mysterious light appearing in this region had been asso-
ciated with the cacique ancestor, now, local superstition attributes it to Marti-
na’s ghost; however, the shadowy figure is soon identified as Carlota, who has
come to pay homage to Sab in his final resting place. The Gothic atmosphere
suggests that, although their union was impossible given existing class and
racial barriers, the lovers are united in the mythical time/space of a (future)
imagined nation: “¿Habrá podido olvidar la hija de los trópicos, al esclavo que
descansa en una humilde sepultura bajo aquel hermoso cielo?” (320) (“will
the daughter of the tropics have been able to forget the slave who rests in a
simple grave under that magnificent sky?” [Sab, Scott, 147]).
Sab’s farewell letter brings together all the elements of Gómez de Avella-
neda’s Romantic ecology to provide an edifying, albeit contradictory, “moral
of landscape” (Bate 62). Sab seeks in nature—the azure sky of the tropics, the
night sky, the blustering winds of the hurricane—an answer to his question re-
garding the basic inequity of his condition. While nature guarantees the equal-
ity among all humans, it is social injustice that condemns the slave to an abject
state, hence upsetting the inherent harmony of nature. Without a place in the
social order, the slave is condemned to pariah status, denied a claim to citi-
zenship or land (309–311). Sab’s rhetoric denounces the fundamental cause
of the slavery system: a radical split between nature and culture, a severing of
the bonds between the natural and social worlds. Only a pervasive belief in
the unity of nature can save him, for that is what had fanned his all-consuming
passion (312–313).

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Picturing Cuba in a Trans-American Frame

Striking her own note as a transnational writer, Gómez de Avellaneda’s pic-

turing Cuba as a natural space is both a pastoral hymn to her island from
her vantage point in the peninsula (nostalgia) as well as a dirge before the
failure of modernity to sustain a viable project of nation-building. By her po-
etic rendition of garden, field, and cave, Gómez de Avellaneda affirms “Cuba
pequeña” (little Cuba), articulating her own discourse of resistance to sugar,
one aligned with the Del Monte circle’s program of reform but countering
their allegiance with British abolitionists (Luis 1–4; Benítez Rojo “Power/
Sugar/Literature” 26–28, 35).
In many ways, Gómez de Avellaneda’s treatment of nature echoes José
María Heredia’s “Himno del desterrado,” which depicts Cuba as a binary be-
tween paradise and hell:

¡Dulce Cuba! En tu seno se miran

En su grado más alto y profundo
La bellezas del físico mundo,
Los horrores del mundo moral. (Heredia 75)

(Cuba! In thy bosom are coupled

of the physical world, its beauty
of the moral world
its horror.)

At a later stage in her life, returning to Spain via New York, Gómez de Avella-
neda’s “A vista del Niágara” (Antología poética 234–239) responds to one of
Heredia’s most famous poems, “Oda al Niágara,” a celebration of the Ameri-
can sublime (Heredia 221–229). In contrast to Heredia, her poetic voice falls
silent before the imposing waterfalls, since both her widowed state and her
precursor’s verses have muted what would otherwise have been a song of
admiration and praise (Antología poética 235). Unlike Heredia, whose ode
ends on a Romantic longing for love, Gómez de Avellaneda turns her gaze,
not to sentiment, but to an object fashioned by human industry: the bridge
uniting two sides of the same continent (Antología poética 238), thus affirm-
ing a hemispheric view of the Americas.20 A similar transamerican perspective
surfaces in “El viajero americano” (The American Traveler), a poem where a
traveler views from above the high sierras surrounding the valley of Mexico
and its imposing landscape of snow-capped volcanoes.21 The prospect view
soon gives way to a vision of “un nuevo paraíso” (a new paradise) composed
of gardens, forests, waterfalls, and caverns, a composite image of American

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landscapes which ends abruptly when the traveler arrives at the desert. There
the vision turns into a mirage, for the traveler has now reached an inward
vision—an inscape—of the diverse ecologies conjoined in the Americas (An-
tología poética 157–158). As “viajera solitaria” (a solitary traveler), la pere-
grina bridging two worlds, Spain and Cuba, Europe and the New World, Gó-
mez de Avellaneda shares her own inner vision so that we, too, can reimagine
our own space and place.

Notes

1. Albin also quotes Sarduy in her reading of “Al partir.” The predominance of sound
leads her to assess the poem’s lyrical “I” as nomadic subject (111–112).
2. Carlos Raggi affirms that “Al partir” shows Byron’s influence, as the Cuban author’s
Memorias, recalls Byron’s “The Corsair,” which accents the allure of sea voyage and
the freedom of maritime travel (38–39).
3. Luis privileges the writers associated with the Del Monte circle who resided in Cuba
as the originators of “early anti-slavery works” (4–5).
4. See Picón Garfield, Araújo (1997), and Guerra’s lucid readings.
5. All references to Sab, unless otherwise noted, are from the 1973 edition by Mary
Cruz.
6. A contrast established in chapter 2 ([1973] 144–145).
7. In her edition, Mary Cruz notes: “Escenario romántico, la naturaleza cubana, despo-
jada de su realidad por la fantasía de la autora, que le confiere otra realidad poetizada,
puebla el mundo novelesco de Sab de elementos nunca vistos en la literatura de ficción”
([1973] 91). (A romantic setting, the Cuban environment, stripped of its reality by the
author’s fantasy, who projects onto it another, poeticized reality, dominates the novelis-
tic world of Sab, composed of elements never before seen in literary fiction).
8. I agree with Bate’s reappraisal of Wordsworth as a “Poet of Nature,” and his assess-
ment of Romanticism as a movement prefiguring contemporary concerns about nature
and the environment (9). Both science and art, the term “ecology” was coined in 1866
by German zoologist Ernst Haeckel “who defined it as ‘the body of knowledge con-
cerning the economy of nature’ [ . . . ] the relationship between living beings and their
environment” (Bate 36). It is in that sense that I read Gómez de Avellaneda’s fiction
and poetry.
9. Mary Cruz also notes that the term “labriego” to describe Sab is not usual in Cuba
(323), another sign of the author’s acknowledgement of a peninsular reader.
10. He continues: “It was more ‘economical’ to clear forests and put cane fields in their
place, using the wood to rebuild the mill quickly. Finally, there was the imperious

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need to keep a reserve of woodland to feed the fires under the boilers during the har-
vest” (49–50).
11. “Although ingenios existed in other areas, their smaller numbers and less powerful tech-
nologies made their impact on the environment relatively less” (Funes Monzote 129).
12. “The center of slave plantation system moved from the Havana area to east, occupy-
ing natural regions in the cane had not yet been grown” (Funes Monzote 129).
13. Although the figures are a bit contradictory, Funes Monzote indicates 44.6 caballerías
en Puerto Príncipe, Nuevitas, and Oriente, compared to 43.3 in Havana-Matanzas
(129–130).
14. “Sabido es que las riquezas de Cuba atraen en todo tiempo innumerables extranjeros,
que con mediana industria y actividad no tardan en enriquecerse de una manera asom-
brosa para los indolentes isleños que [ . . . ] se adormecen, [ . . . ] y abandonan a la
codicia y actividad de los europeos todos los ramos de la agricultura comercio, e indu-
stria” ([1973] 149) (“It is well known that Cuba’s riches continually attract innumer-
able foreigners who, with middling effort and activity, soon become prosperous, in a
way that astonishes the indolent islanders; these [ . . . ] become somnolescent [ . . . ]
surrendering their agriculture, commerce, and industry to the greed and enterprise of
the Europeans” [Sab, Scott, 38]).
15. The eldest Otway is described as a “buhonero,” associated with piracy or contraband
trade; he is not, strictly speaking a “peddler in the United States,’” as rendered in
Nina M. Scott’s translation (38); on this hinges Brickhouse’s reading of the novel,
which has Enrique “born in all likelihood in the United States” given “his father’s for-
mer peddling years” (174). However, the eldest Otway is associated, not with North
America, but with two Catalan merchants with whom he set up shop. That confirms
the Otways’ British lineage, bolstered by the fact that Enrique is sent to London to
study, much like Isaacs’s Efraín (149–150). The link between peninsular and British
mercantile interests could not be more clear.
16. Don Carlos’s family objected to the match due to Jorge Otway’s suspicious origins
and nouveau riche status; when, at Carlota’s insistence, he agreed to have her marry
Enrique, the family dispossessed him. To add to his misfortune, a legal suit had also
deprived him of his late wife’s inheritance. Likewise, the elder Otway saw the mar-
riage as a way to recuperate from financial set-back (1973] 153–155).
17. The garden is not merely “an ideal space for intimacy and daydreaming,” as Sommer
claims, concluding, somewhat hastily, that “he, [ . . . ] as much as Carlota, needed a
spot for recreation” (119–120). It is both Sab’s gift to his beloved and a sign of his
love, as well as a metonymy of nation, as I argue here. Cruz explains that the type of
cane alluded to here is the “caña brava” or “caña bambú” (328); the cane used in sugar
manufacture was the Otahiti strain.
18. Silvestre de Balboa was a poet from the Canary Islands who served as “escribano” in
the zone of Puerto Príncipe; Espejo de paciencia registers the degree of integration
and prosperity achieved by an emerging criollo society in Bayamo (Benítez Rojo, La
isla que se repite 25–26). The poem was discovered by José Antonio Echeverría, one

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of the members of the Del Monte circle, who turned it into the cornerstone of Cuban
literature (González Echevarría 105–109). For a new reading of Espejo de paciencia,
see Marrero-Fente Epic, Empire and Community in the Atlantic World: Silvestre de
Balboa’s Espejo de paciencia.
19. “La tierra que fue regada con la sangre una vez lo será aún otra: los descendientes de
los opresores serán oprimidos, y los hombres negros serán los terribles vengadores de
los hombres cobrizos” (168) (“The earth which was once drenched in blood will be so
again: the descendants of the oppressors will be themselves oppressed, and the black
men will be the terrible avengers of those of copper color” [Sab, Scott, 73]).
20. For further discussion of the connections between Heredia and Gómez de Avellane-
da’s Niágara poems, see Albin (134–142, 146–161).
21. For further discussion of “El viajero americano,” see Albin (242–258).

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____. Visión romántica del Otro: Estudio comparativo de Atala y Cumandá, Bug-Jargal
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