The sugar-slavery-race nexus is inextricable from the violent history of plantation societies of the Caribbean, including Cuba, where writers, scholars and artists—in equal measure on the island and in the diaspora—have long engaged in the exploration of the devastating brutality of the “plantation complex.” Ever since the “original sin” (Lockard 1994, 95) of the genocide of Indigenous populations and the enslavement of African peoples put the pan-Caribbean “plantation machine” into its relentless forward motion, sugar—to a greater degree than other commodities, such as tobacco or coffee—has become woven into the tangled rhizome of Cuban history and identity, both as a material commodity and as a metaphor. The enduring impact of the intermeshing colonialist/imperialist and racialist legacy of the plantation continues to haunt contemporary lives and imaginaries to such an extent that various scholars have suggested renaming the modern era as “Plantationocene” in search of a critical tool for recalibrating some of the extant approaches.

Even though it is impossible to convey the depravity of human bondage by means of words, images or numbers—the latter often skewed by undercounts—ultimately, the unspeakable and the unthinkable are also indelible. The limits of representation and imagination are constantly challenged by human resolve to understand, explore, bear witness, denounce, honor, exorcise and, in the end, perhaps heal. These efforts resurface as echoes and traces across the arts and multidisciplinary scholarship, and thus far they have generated a bibliography of such staggering proportions that I am able to reference only its small fraction while remaining keenly aware of what I had to leave out. However, as a scholar probing the depths of the dark mirroring of the artistic reinscriptions of racial bondage, I also must respect the boundaries of my own critical intervention and “the right to opacity,” so importantly posited by Édouard Glissant (1997), of all those real heroes, witnesses, victims and survivors who have been denied the right to self-representation in the first place.

Throughout this chapter, I will employ the Plantationocene as a backdrop and a parable for my analysis of the racialized iconography of the sugar plantation in selected works by contemporary Cuban artists.