Year of the Lash (in Spanish, Año del Cuero) is a term used in Cuba in reference to 1844. In that year the Spanish colony was wracked by accusations of a planned slave revolt known as the Conspiración de La Escalera. The term "Year of the Lash" refers generally to the harsh response toward the revolt by Cuban authorities, whereby thousands of Afro-Cubans (both slave and free) were executed, imprisoned, or banished from the island. La Escalera (the ladder) alludes to the fact that slave suspects were bound to ladders and whipped with the lash when they were interrogated.
Historians have debated over the years whether the Conspiracy of La Escalera was real or whether it was largely an invention of the Spanish authorities to justify a crackdown on abolitionists and the Afro-Cuban population, though at this point there seems to be a consensus that some kind of revolt was planned. The British consul to Cuba, David Turnbull, was convicted in absentia of being the "prime mover" of the conspiracy. Turnbull had already been expelled by Cuban authorities two years earlier.
Famous quotes containing the words year of, year and/or lash:
“We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more—the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort—to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires—and expires, too soon, too soon—before life itself.”
—Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)
“Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)