This chapter examines the pioneering role of Getrudis Gómez de Avellaneda as a transatlantic intellectual; as the initiator of what became the long-lasting trope among Cuban writers of lejanía [distance] or imagining Cuba from afar; and as a precursor of modern feminism whose persistent interweaving of race and gender, the chapter argues, constitutes the writer’s signature contribution to Cuban literature. Devoting much of the essay to Gómez de Avellaneda’s fiction, including Sab, Dos mujeres, Guatimozín, and El artista barquero o los cuatro cinco de junio, the chapter teases out this body of work’s exemplification of both early abolitionism and a feminist consciousness, tracing the latter to Gómez de Avellaneda’s essay on Mercedes Merlin, which established the first female genealogy of Cuban literature.

This chapter examines Cuban fiction about slavery emerging in the 1830s–1840s: Petrona y Rosalía (1838) by Félix Tanco y Bosmeniel; Francisco, el ingenio o las delicias del campo (1838–1839) by Anselmo Suárez y Romero; the short story “Cecilia Valdés” (1839) by Cirilo Villaverde (1812–1894), who later developed it into the novel Cecilia Valdés o La Loma del Ángel (1882); Autobiografía de un esclavo (1840) by Juan Francisco Manzano; and Sab (1841) by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. The chapter contextualizes the analysis in tensions between the demands for labor and “ad hoc moral alibis” characterizing Plantation America, particularly the improvised concepts of racial differentiation – Blackness and Black-and-white miscegenation – typifying responses to these tensions. The analysis of this literature as speculative writing that looks simultaneously toward the past and future links it to the sometimes improvisational and speculative nature of the new plantation-based societies, which were themselves entangled between speculative finance capital and moral reflections on freedom, and to the intensified anxieties about Cuba’s racialized future generated by the 1841 demographic census.