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:
“Living more lives than one, knowing people of all classes, all shades of opinion, monarchists, republicans, socialists, anarchists, has had a salutary effect on my mind. If every year of my life, every month of the year, I had lived with reformers and crusaders I should be, by this time, a fanatic. As it is I have had such varied things to do, I have had so many different contacts that I am not even very much of a crank.”
—Rheta Childe Dorr (1866–1948)
“1992 is not a year I shall look back on with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an Annus Horribilis.”
—Elizabeth II (b. 1926)
“Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)