Dictators, Despots, and Caudillos in the Age of Revolution: The Historical Novel and the Afterlives of Slavery in Cuba and Puerto Rico

This dissertation analyzes twentieth-century historical novels about slavery from Cuba and Puerto Rico that reinterpret the Age of Revolution in the circum-Atlantic world. The texts studied are Lino Novás Calvo’s El negrero (1933), Alejo Carpentier’s El siglo de las luces (1962), and Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá’s La noche oscura del Niño Avilés(1984). My argument is twofold. First, I argue that the novels stage their protagonists’ deformation into despots following their encounters with African slavery, exposing the limits of an Enlightenment project of modernity premised on a discourse of liberty that circulated amidst regimes of enslavement. Second, I contend that the historical imaginary evoked by the characters intervenes politically in the novels’ twentieth-century moment of writing, tracing a through line between authoritarian political forms past and present. Dictators, Despots, and Caudillos in the Age of Revolution examines the cultural and political context of each novel’s moment of writing to study the historical continuities between the islands’ origins as plantation islands and the twentieth-century prominence of island caudillos, charismatic political leaders who centered the state on themselves. I contend that these historical novels critique twentieth-century non-democratic structures in the Caribbean and abroad, revealing twentieth-century authoritarian political structures as afterlives of slavery and the racial imaginaries perpetuated by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial projects. I analyze and compare the literary production and historical imagination of three key moments in the twentieth century: despot Gerardo Machado’s rule in Cuba in the 1930s; the last years of Fulgencio Batista’s government in the 1950s; and the crisis of the colonial model proposed by Luis Muñoz Marín in Puerto Rico in the 1970s.