author
J. G. (Justo Germán) Cantero
1815–1871
Best known for Los ingenios de Cuba, this 19th-century Cuban writer and intellectual brought together literature, music, and a detailed record of the island’s sugar world. His work remains one of the most recognizable books connected to colonial-era Cuba.
1 Audiobook
Los ingenios: colección de vistas de los principles ingenios de azúcar de la isla de Cuba
by J. G. (Justo Germán) Cantero
About the author
Born in Trinidad, Cuba, in 1815, Justo Germán Cantero trained as a physician and was also known as a pianist, composer, and poet. He moved easily between cultural life and public life, building a reputation as a cultivated figure in 19th-century Cuba.
He is most closely associated with Los ingenios de Cuba, the richly illustrated 1857 work created with artist Eduardo Laplante. The book is remembered for its sweeping views of Cuban sugar estates and for the picture it gives of the island’s plantation economy in the mid-1800s.
Cantero also belonged to the sugar-owning class, a fact that places his writing inside the very world it describes. He died in 1871, but his name endures above all through Los ingenios, a book valued both as a literary project and as a historical document.