Juan Francisco Manzano (1797–1854) was born a house slave in the Matanzas Province of Cuba during the colonial period. Manzano's father died before he was 15 and his only remaining family was his mother and two brothers. Manzano worked as a page through his whole life, which was a privileged job for a slave. He wrote two works of poetry and his autobiography while still enslaved. The Autobiography of a Slave is one of two only documented accounts of 19th-century Cuban slavery, the only existing narrative accounts of slavery in Spanish America. (The other is by Esteban Mesa Montejo.) Irish abolitionist Richard Robert Madden published his Poems by a slave in the island of Cuba in 1840. A second part to his autobiography was lost. He obtained his freedom in 1837 and later wrote a book of poem