Re-reading the Infanticide Narrative: Enslaved Death, Plantation Medicine, and the Law in Cuba after 1820.

This article focuses on the 1837 criminal infanticide case of Teresa Lucumí, an enslaved African woman in nineteenth-century Cuba, examining how enslavers constructed and manipulated narratives of infanticide to deflect legal and moral responsibility for enslaved child deaths. Teresa's alleged confession was likely fabricated by local authorities and her enslavers, who suppressed her testimony that implicated them in abuse, rape, and murder of her son, highlighting the systemic silencing of enslaved women's voices in judicial proceedings. The case illustrates how infanticide accusations functioned within Cuba's evolving legal, medical, and moral frameworks to reinforce enslavers' control and obscure the realities of enslaved motherhood under brutal conditions. It challenges conventional interpretations of enslaved women's criminal infanticide convictions by revealing these narratives as tools of social and legal power rather than straightforward evidence of maternal violence.