İngilizce
written in the chapel of the Hospital de Santa Cristina on the night before his execution translated from the Spanish by James Weldon Johnson If the unfortunate fate engulfing me,…
Diego Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés, known better by the pseudonym Plácido, was an Afro-Cuban poet born on March 18, 1809, in Havana. Though he never published a full-length collection, his poems were popular in his native Cuba and earned him the admiration of his Latin American and Caribbean contemporaries. He was executed without trial or evidence on June 28, 1844, for his alleged participation in La Conspiración de la Escalera, a suspected slave revolt in Spanish Cuba—the veracity of which is still debated today.