The Sun of Jesús 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 world's wealthiest colony in 1843-44. 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 edition--featuring an invaluable, contextualizing introduction and afterword in addition to the new English translation--offers 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.