Translated into English for the first time, Andrs Avelino de Orihuelas El Sol de Jess del Monte is a landmark Cuban antislavery novel. Published originally in 1852, the same year as Harriet Beecher Stowes Uncle Toms Cabin (which Orihuela had translated into Spanish), it provides an uncompromising critique of discourses of white superiority and an endorsement of equality for free people of color. Despite its historical and literary value, The Sun of Jess del Monte is a long-neglected text, languishing for 150 years until its republication in 2008 in the original Spanish.

The Sun of Jess del Monte is the only Cuban novel of its time to focus on La Escalera, or the Ladder Rebellion, a major anticolonial and slave insurrection of nineteenth-century Cuba that shook the worlds wealthiest colony in 184344. It is also the only Cuban novel of its time to take direct aim at white privilege and unsparingly denounce the oppression of free people of color that intensified after the insurrection. This new critical editionfeaturing an invaluable, contextualizing introduction and afterword in addition to the new English translationoffers readers the most detailed portrait of the everyday lives and plight of free people of color in Cuba in any novel up to the 1850s.

Writing the Early Americas