Sab

Eleven years before Uncle Tom’s Cabin dealt with the abolition of slavery in North America, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1814-1873) wrote Sab, an unhappy love story between a mulatto slave and the daughter of his white owner. The book was so controversial that it was not published in Cuba until 1914, seventy-three years after its appearance in Spain. Here the struggles for the abolition of slavery in the American colonies are reflected.
The novel tells us the human relations between masters and slaves before the law that abolished slavery was enacted.

• Sab is a mongrel slave, son of a slave and the master of the farm where he works,
• who falls in love with Charlotte, the heiress of the estate,
• and that puts the love he feels towards her before his freedom and that of his family.

But Sab is also the story of Teresa, Charlotte’s maid, who through her actions and her words reflects the voice of the other dark side of slavery: the slave woman of the time.

“The slave can at least change masters, he can hope that by collecting gold he will one day buy his freedom: but the woman, when she raises her weakened hands and her outraged forehead, to ask for freedom, hears the monster with the sepulchral voice that cries out to her: ‘In the grave.’”

In addition, the work exposes the tragic situation of the indigenous people of Cuba, which is a reflection of how far that society is capable of reaching that destroyed everything that was not included in its plans, as it devastated the people, culture, language and society of Cuba prior to the conquest.

Edition and prologue by Adriana López-Labourdette.