Commentary

1. Joaquín Aponte appears in another, even more richly elaborated context on pages 18 and 19, which his grandson explained as follows: READ MORE

   “On the left side figures of the god of the winds in front of the entrance to the castillo de Cabañas, [the name of] which is found inscribed below with the sugar mill of Don Gonzalo de Herrera and the tower of the Mariel fortress [and] the Tablas pier figuring in the lower part [of the picture], the sugar mill of Don José María Escobar Callo…and a few fishing boats further to the right. The goddess Velona [i.e., the Roman deity of war] in her wagon drawn by two horses indicating the…to the battle fought by Captain Joaquín de Aponte, grandfather of the deponent, at the Tower of Marianao against six hundred men and one English battalion who landed there and were all taken prisoners except for the [commanding] lord, who died and is depicted in such condition with appropriate uniform near the bottom of the tower, above which is [seen] a frigate that transported them to this spot. Next to the tower and surrounding the dead [commander] are some black soldiers who did violence to him and another one on horseback, who represents the Lieutenant Major Ermengildo de la Luz. Further to the right above some embankments are depicted the Lieutenant José Antonio Escobar and the rest of the black company in the act of leading a number of white prisoners who were those [of] the English who had entered the city at six in the morning and had been brought [hither] by Nicolás Aponte, the son of his grandfather [i.e., Aponte’s paternal uncle], who is also shown on horseback near a flag in the paw of a lion the larger part of whose body is hidden in a cavity (Franco 1977, 133–34).”[33] (Palmié 2002, 101-102)

2. In another case [plates XVIII–XIX], the author’s grandfather, Joaquín Aponte, together with other officials (Hermenegildo de la Luz, José Antonio Escoval) and soldiers of the Black Battalions (the father of the author, Nicolás Aponte) appear triumphant in the defence of the Tower of Marianao (Havana) during the English invasion of 1762.[72] (Pavez Ojeda 2012, 288)

3. The images numbered 18 and 19, for example, portrayed Aponte’s grandfather, Captain Joaquín de Aponte, and Havana’s black battalion defeating six hundred English troops who entered the city at Marianao during the 1762 British attack on Havana.READ MORE

   In the picture, the black troops escort white prisoners, and two black soldiers stand over a dead white officer, described by Aponte as a milor, milord or English nobleman. Here, as in the other image, a strict historical reading is possible. In this vein, the picture of blacks battling whites straightforwardly represents a historical episode in which the colored militias were deployed in defense of Havana and Spain.[91] But Aponte’s fellow conspirators would have seen the image as something more — as an emblem of black heroism, as the basis of a demand for black rights in the present, and perhaps as an indication that their own black army might be up to the challenge of defeating a white one in the proximate future. Another image of the black militias makes clear the layers of meaning that Aponte and his co-conspirators might have attached to the pictures. (Ferrer 2014, 316)

4. La alegoría a las corporaciones negras y sus figuras heroicas se despliega también en las láminas [XVIII-XIX] que se pueden leer cómo frescos historiográficos y genealógicos, o una forma en miniatura de los murales edificantes que se solían pintar en los muros de los barrios extramuros de La Habana en esos años. READ MORE

   La genealogía familiar que presentan también recuerda la producción de lo que se llamaba entonces «jeroglíficos», que era un tipo de tarjetas pintadas, impresas o grabadas, que usaba la aristocracia cubana para conmemorar a sus familiares desparecidos, reproduciendo así la memoria de su linaje.[85] Este tipo de lámina muestra a un Aponte también preocupado de darle los honores merecidos a sus antepasados destacados en la historia, militar en este caso, adaptando las formas conmemorativas blancas para la producción de los lugares de una memoria negra. Las láminas funden entonces el registro histórico con el familiar, entregando información de primera mano sobre su abuelo Nicolás Joaquín Aponte, capitán de granaderos del Batallón de morenos, que combate en la Chorrera y en Puentes Grandes para la invasión británica de La Habana (1763), para luego incorporarse a la expedición a Louisiana, donde participa en la toma de Nueva Orleáns al mando del general O’Reilly, y donde obtiene la medalla de oro al mérito (1770). Joaquín Aponte aparecerá de nuevo en este Libro, en las láminas XXXII-XXXIII. Además, se destaca para esta historia militar al primer oficial negro, Juan José Ovando, nombrado en 1701.[86] La historia de las glorias militares de los batallones negros y sus héroes se articula en el Libro de Pinturas con la de los ejércitos abisinios en su conquista de la antigua Hispania. Lo notable es que presenta el episodio de este ejército negro triunfante en un mismo plano de composición que el episodio de la derrota del rey asirio Senaquerib (láminas XLIV-B y XLV). (Pavez Ojeda 2006b, 700-701)

5. As with the image of the invasion of New Providence, it seems as if we are dealing with a naive and straightforward form of commemorative pictorial representation, comparable perhaps to the popular frescos adorning several public buildings in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Havana and proliferating in the rapidly growing barrios extramuros.[34] READ MORE

   Yet, after introducing, with the Spanish lion, the first symbolic element, Aponte suddenly switches from a mere narration of the picture’s scenic and narrative content to an exegesis of its imagery. He begins with an unfortunately corrupt statement about the meaning of the flags carried by the black militiamen and then continues with the following explication of what he calls el júbilo de Capn. Aponte: “The jubilee of Captain Aponte [directed] to God [and] the King [is] represented by the lion with the flag or the fatherland, which is pictured as an Indian woman [held] in the arms of four other Indians, another woman with two drums, and another [drum?] turned around to face Mairel [Mariel?], which is how this Indian used to be called. The jubilee of Aponte, he [i.e., the younger Aponte] continues to say, is signified in a mute metaphoric décima [décima muda metafora][35] that should have figured in the upper white [space] that has ten lines drawn out in pencil [but never was inscribed there]; it is shown by the tree blooming forth with flames, painted below in the midst of water…From Aponte love burns upward in live flames to God, the King, and the fatherland. Hidden from your sight by dense smoke, his ardor bursts forth from the waters [like] a strong wall [that] breathes flames. The painting that follows above with the moon at its farthest point concludes the tree’s allusion with the coat of arms of the city of Havana and an eagle above another tree adorning the configuration. (Franco 1977, 133).”[36] Here, history in its conventional post-Enlightenment sense merges with an almost mystical allegoricism, reminiscent in its vividly dramatic imagery of Spanish Counter Reformation baroque while at the same time formally indebted to another popular Cuban tradition: that of the jeroglíficos, series of allegorical depictions of the exploits and achievements of deceased members of the elite. In Cuba, such “hieroglyphs,” typically bearing inscriptions in verse,[37] were commissioned from largely anonymous (and usually black) artists for obsequies and memorial services and either distributed in the form of printed cards (tarjetas) or affixed as large paintings to the walls of a church. Given the fact that Aponte must have been familiar with the formal and stylistic properties of this genre, it may well be that the jeroglíficos represent one source of cultural forms on which he drew in composing this unfinished homage to an important (perhaps apical) ancestor of his own. If emblematic art had come to serve the purposes of linking the temporal memory of deceased members of the mundane elite to eternal principles, why should that same mechanism not be set to work for a man who, in Aponte’s eyes, deserved such praises irrespective of the incongruence between his humble social status and his historically transcendent achievement? We get here a first indication of what Raymond Williams might have called the mode of practice informing the production of Aponte’s libro de pinturas as an individual, maybe even highly idiosyncratic, project.[39] As the following examples show even more clearly, Aponte does not simply borrow a foreign cultural form in order to replicate its conventional symbolic functions. On the one hand, he appropriates such allogenic cultural material by harnessing the means provided by a representational genre monopolized (although not produced) by the white Cuban elite to the end of celebrating the virtues of an ancestor who—as a mere black militia officer in an increasingly racist society—was destined to social oblivion, regardless of whatever services he had rendered to God or country. Yet, on the other hand, Aponte also expropriates and transforms this colonial form of European mortuary praise along with its (presumably stock-in-trade) emblematic conventions[40] by recontextualizing it in ways that defy the canon of artistic production from which he has drawn. Aponte’s description of the júbilo of his grandfather, thus, allows the identification of elements of several well-known European iconographic traditions: the Indian female as a motive common to Continental allegory since the sixteenth century; the tree of flames (or perhaps the burning bush) proper to the iconology of Counter Reformation spirituality; the blazing ardor of selfless patriotic love deriving from seventeenth-century emblematic conventions; the lion, tree, and eagle pertaining to aristocratic heraldry; and, finally, moon and water suggesting a darker, perhaps hermetic, sort of mysticism. Once judged from the perspective of European iconology, however, these elements appear fragmented and reassembled in an uneasy juxtaposition, thrown together, as it were, in a manner alien to their contexts of origin and, therefore, damaging to their original symbolic purpose.[41] (Palmié 2002, 102-104)