ABSTRACT
This chapter revisits José Antonio Saco’s intellectual contribution to the Hispanic archive that emerges from the recovery of Bartolomé de las Casas’ texts and the colonial connections between indigenous slavery and the African slave trade. While Las Casas had been praised as the defender of the Indians, a shadow was cast on his legacy regarding his promotion of African slavery as a substitution for Indian labor. This issue becomes crucial as Saco, a prominent Cuban intellectual, constructed a national and Caribbean ethos with the irreconcilable economic and political tensions tied to slavery and race. Saco denounced the slave trade but did not embrace instant abolition. The adoption of Las Casas’ gaze, his pioneering anti-slavery reformist stance, and his early miscegenation ideas allows for the Cuban criollo intellectual to embrace notions of emancipation that did not come directly from the French or the Anglo-Saxon traditions, but from Spain itself. Saco thus can shape a notion of Hispanism, filtered through Las Casas, that facilitates a multiple and contradictory identification with coloniality, that allows him to anchor his national, Caribbean, and universal historiographical project in the Hispanic and Black Atlantic. In turn, Saco and the Lascasian legacy that he rescued becomes an important colonial departure for contemporary theorizations: Fernando Ortiz’ vision of a process of transculturation with repercussions beyond the Caribbean, as well as Antonio Benítez Rojo’s Caribbean readings of a paradoxical and complex repeating island.
