My dissertation recenters the resistant activities and political cultures of rural Cuban slaves in the 1844 conspiracy of La Escalera. It intervenes in a history long enamoured with the conspiracy's international dimensions and prominent actors, and a tradition of silencing the slaves themselves until the moment of repression. Using the testimonies from the trial record, my work will attempt to reconstruct the ways in which enslaved people were imagining and coordinating this moment of resistance. It will offer an in­depth consideration of the physical and social spaces where personal relationships, political aspirations, and ideologies of resistance were forged and tested, thus expanding our knowledge of the social and political dynamics of Afro-Cuban slave movements. My dissertation will offer a reading that seeks to understand enslaved people's organizing as a series of multi-dimensional, sometimes contradictory projects; projects informed by the intersection of numerous political visions, gender discourses, and racial self-concepts, and by the day-to-day mechanics of grassroots organizing. I argue that this can suggest new ways in which to understand the collective resistance of enslaved people in the African Diaspora.