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Anselmo Suárez y Romero (1818–1878) was a renowned writer and novelist, better known for the first fictional work about slavery in the Americas: Francisco.

Life
Sánchez y Romero was educated in his native city, where he devoted himself to teaching and contributing to public education.
 * His literary career began with the publication of Biografía de Carlota Valdés (Havana, 1838).(Biography of Carlota Valdés).
 * Between 1838 and 1839 he writes the novel Francisco which would be published posthumously.
 * In 1859, followed by a series of masterly sketches and descriptions of Cuban sceneries and customs, Colección de Artículos (Collection of articles) is published.
 * In that same year he was admitted into the Law Bar Association.
 * In 1862, other of his works, mostly essays about public education and school reform was published in Havana.
 * In 1870, Cartas críticas sobre asuntos jurídicos was published.
 * In 1880 the novel Francisco, which depicted Cuban slavery, is published. (Years before Uncle Tom's Cabin would be publish), in New York City.

Literary career
Anselmo Suárez y Romero's masterpiece: Francisco, also known as Francisco, el ingenio o las delicias del campo, written between 1838 and 1839, is considered the first anti-slavery novel in the Americas. The other work which encompassed the slavery life, was the short story Petrona y Rosalía by Félix Tanco y Bosmeniel (1797–1871), which touched upon slaves' lives in the nineteenth century.

Based largely on accounts from "Autobiografía de un esclavo", the autobiography written by Juan Francisco Manzano years before, and which was published later in England, the novel set out the way for other novels to follow: Cecilia Valdés by Cirilo Villaverde begun in 1839, Sab by Gertrudes Gómez de Avellaneda in 1841, El Ranchador by Pedro José Morillas in 1856, Antonio Zambrana's El negro Francisco in 1873, and Alejo Carpentier's ¡Ecué-Yambá! in 1933.

About the importance of Francisco as a literary masterpiece, British abolitionist Richard Robert Madden was quoted as saying that: Tho there is literary merit of but small amount in this piece, there is life and truth in every line of it. [...]   In this little piece of the Ingenio there is a minuteness of description and closeness of observation and a rightness of feeling that I have     not often seen surpassed.

Madden himself thought that the narrative employed by Suárez y Romero in Francisco had a palpable realm of unseeable realism in it. No other book, in his opinion, was as descriptive, or as graphically drafted, as in Franciscos prose, in which slavery was depicted with the same intellectual rigor as in real life in Cuba. Madden found certain parts of the book originally narrated, in a prose style by which Suárez y Romero was known for, especially when the central figure in the book, still shackled after being injured by lashes, had to endure the humid heat in a mistreated and painful state, while harvesting sugar cane.

Most of the early readers of Francisco agreed with Madden in that the book had a realistic and accurate representation not before seen.

Others, like the critic Enrique Piñeyro, thought that the book was unoriginal. His opinion would appear in the periodical El Ateneo in Havana, and later in Revista Cubana.