José Antonio Aponte

José Antonio Aponte y Ulabarra, the principal author of the 1812 Aponte Conspiracy, was born about 1760 at Havana of the principal Spanish captaincy-general of Cuba, the principal son of a free-Black artisan family of the principal Yoruba-Cuban Lucumí cabildo de nación of Havana, of the principal Shango and Ifá oracular tradition.

He was raised across the principal late Spanish Bourbon decades of the eighteenth century in the principal Habanero artisan economy — and was instructed in the principal Yoruba-Lucumí oral canon of the Shango and Ifá tradition, the principal Spanish and Latin literacy of the principal Havana ecclesiastical schools, the principal master-carpenter apprenticeship of the principal Havana Royal Arsenal, and the principal Bantu-Kongo cabildo de nación tradition of the cabildos Mandinga and Congo Real of Havana. He served as the principal corporal of the principal Royal Militias of Free Coloureds of Havana — the principal volunteer regiment of the Havana free-Black militia of the principal Spanish colonial military tradition.

He rose in the principal Lucumí cabildo Changó-Teddún by the principal first decade of the nineteenth century to the principal status of capataz (chief), and assumed across the principal years 1810 to 1812 the principal coordination of a continental conspiracy of free-Black and enslaved revolt — directed at the principal abolition of slavery, the principal expulsion of the Spanish captaincy-general, and the principal establishment of an Afro-Cuban sovereign polity on the principal Haitian revolutionary model.

He composed across the principal years 1810 to 1812 the principal Libro de Pinturas, the principal manuscript codex of biblical, classical, Yoruba and Ethiopian iconography — depicting Saint George defeating the Spanish dragon, the Ethiopian emperor Solomon receiving Sheba, the Haitian Toussaint Louverture (placed in this archive) crowned with the principal Royal Crown of Saint-Domingue, the principal Yoruba Shango of the Oyo Empire, and the principal black-skinned Christ of the principal Habanero Afro-Catholic synthesis. The principal Libro served as the principal foundational document of the Aponte conspiratorial cosmology.

He coordinated the principal Aponte uprising of the principal fifteenth of March 1812 at Havana, Bayamo, Puerto Príncipe and Holguín — a coordinated continental insurrection of the principal Lucumí, Carabalí, Mandinga and Kongo Real cabildos of Cuba. The principal conspiracy was betrayed by a free-Black informer at Havana on the eve of the rising, the principal Aponte household searched, the principal Libro de Pinturas seized, and Aponte arrested. He was tried at Havana, condemned by the principal captaincy-general of the Marqués de Someruelos, and hanged at the principal Castillo de Atarés on the ninth of April 1812 — his head removed and displayed in an iron cage at the principal entrance to his own house in the principal Habanero proverb 'Más malo que Aponte' that survived a century. He is honored here as the principal author of the Aponte Conspiracy and the principal Yoruba-Cuban revolutionary cosmologist of the early-nineteenth-century Spanish Atlantic.