"I have always been fascinated by the figure of the 'indians', but there is a lot of myth surrounding them," explains the novelist, screenwriter and playwright Pere Anglas (Mataró, 1966), who has won the Nèstor Luján historical novel prize with El sastre de Barcelona (Columna). Historiography has already taken care of dismantling the myth of impoverished men who traveled to Cuba and Puerto Rico and returned very rich thanks to their intelligence and effort. There was also the exploitation of slave labor, and one of the men who profited most from it was Antonio López.

In recent years, the issue of 19th-century Catalan slavery, which had remained hidden, has begun to be discussed openly. Catalan industrialization cannot be explained without the blood money that flowed in from Cuba. But slavery has a centuries-long history throughout the world, including in Catalonia. Ancient Rome is its paradigm. With the fall of the empire, this form of total submission, which was also an economic system, did not disappear. Between the 5th and 10th centuries, there was a long transition between slavery and the feudal system: the shift from slaves to serfs (from direct slave exploitation to indirect, feudal, or manorial exploitation). Pure slaves continued to exist, often captured in wars, and now more prevalent in the urban world. In fact, the use of the term slave It resurfaced strongly in the 13th century, at the height of the Middle Ages, with the trafficking of captured men and women, primarily from the Black Sea and southern Europe.