In 1791, the mayor of the city of Havana began criminal proceedings against a paint merchant, known as Pedro Dionisio Muñoz de Carballo, for having “indiscriminately” sold paints and other poisonous substances. Colonial officials suspected these substances had been used by enslaved individuals to poison their masters in a wave of recent deaths. In this seminar, Dr. Rodríguez will first explore the remarkable life of Muñoz himself – a free man of color from Extremadura, Spain – who established himself in colonial Havana and became a successful businessman. Secondly, she will look at how the proceedings offer a perspective on tense racial relations at a time when the aftermath of the initial slave revolts in neighboring Saint Domingue (of what would become the Haitian Revolution) began to reverberate in Cuba. Local elites and Spanish administrators feared the events there would be replicated in Cuba. However, she will show that the documents also provide us with our most salient knowledge of the landscape of colonial Cuban art history at this time. As such, she will argue the proceedings politicize artistic production to an extent that the study of colonial Cuban art history must be undertaken with attention to contemporaneous racial discourse.