Seeds of Insurrection

Domination and Resistance on Western Cuban Plantations, 1808-1848

Manuel Barcia

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780807149393
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

On a late September day in 1837, shortly after sunset, a group of six slaves marched into the small Cuban village of Güira de Melena, beating African drums and singing loudly. Alarmed, villagers rushed into the streets with machetes, sabers, and spears, ready to take action against the disobedient slaves. Yet this makeshift parade never evolved into the violent rebellion the villagers expected. Though the slaves who lived on Cuban coffee and sugar plantations sometimes defied their captors by orchestrating fierce uprisings and committing murder and suicide, they also resisted in less overt ways -- by running away, feigning sickness, breaking tools, and by maintaining their own cultures. In Seeds of Insurrection, Manuel Barcia examines many largely overlooked ways in which African and Creole slaves in Cuba defied domination in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Ethnic and geographic origins, as well as slaves' personal experiences, affected their resistance to bondage. Dividing resistance into two broad types -- violent and nonviolent -- Barcia examines when and why the slaves chose certain forms. Creole slaves grew up in Cuba, for example, so they learned both the language of their ancestors and Spanish, and they came to understand their Spanish masters as few African-born slaves ever could. Consequently, they cleverly used the few rights colonial laws offered them to their advantage. African-born slaves, by contrast, carried with them their memories from home, their religious beliefs, jokes, and songs, and they dealt with enslavement by incorporating this cultural heritage into their everyday activities. Barcia demonstrates the ways in which the slaves made use of the privacy of their huts and barracks and the lack of surveillance in the fields to voice their ideas and opinions -- through song, religion, gossip, folktales, and jokes -- within an acceptable degree of safety.
Relying primarily on transcripts of local and central court proceedings involving slaves, free people of color, slave owners, and witnesses, Barcia reveals the slaves' view of their world. He also explores the forms of domination practiced by colonial authorities, plantation masters, and overseers, gleaning insight from innovative sources, including medical reports and diaries of rancheadores, as well as public and private correspondence, newspapers, and the contributions of contemporary scholars.
In Seeds of Insurrection, Barcia expands the definition of resistance and adds an invaluable dimension to the understanding of slavery in the Americas.

1

The African Background of
Cuban Slaves

Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, sugar and coffee plantations in western Cuba were continuously supplied with new African workers. Although the Creole slave population increased steadily from the 1820s onward, African-born slaves constituted the majority of the slave population on these estates until well into the century. Several authors have looked at the slave trade to Cuba, the conditions of slave transport, and the prices of slaves.¹ Yet the slaves’ cultural backgrounds frequently remain unexplored, and this omission distorts our understanding of slave resistance. In this chapter, I examine the principal cultural and historical backgrounds of the slaves who landed in Cuba between 1790 and 1845, as well as the stereotypes that circulated about the various African ethnic groups in nineteenth-century Cuba. It is no easy task to sort out who these men and women were and where they came from, but because they are the protagonists of this study, it is an indispensable one.

After 1792, and especially after 1803, African slaves landed on Cuban shores in ever greater numbers.² Following the abolition of the legal slave trade within the British Empire in 1807 and among the remaining slave-trading nations between 1820 and 1831, two Latin American territories—Cuba and Brazil—benefited from the illegal slave trade. Cuban, Spanish, Brazilian, and Portuguese traders challenged the Courts of Mixed Commissions and the British navy in their attempts to enforce the end of the slave trade. Despite the risk of being captured, dispossessed, and sent to jail, these men carried on with their trade, and Cuban plantations continued to be well-supplied with cheap labor until the second half of the century.

It is well known that, as Louis A. Perez has recently stated, “Cuban planters early developed cultural profiles of the African naciones, associating dispositions and behaviors with specific ethnic groups.”³ These profiles were often based on the observations made by generations of slave owners and traders and were likely to be biased to some degree. But precisely because these profiles were based on observation—and because the goal of this cultural profiling was to amass wealth for those who benefited from slave labor—they also had some truth in them. Ethnicity was, without doubt, crucial for the planters. For decades, historians have argued that plantation owners avoided buying slaves from the same “nation” in order to avoid rebellions and collective suicides. This theory has become one of the classic myths among historians of slavery, who rarely argue against it. In her last book, however, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall has finally challenged this idea, basing her argument on the fact—shown in some cases analyzed in this study—that slave owners frequently preferred to buy new slaves from the same ethnic groups as slaves already living on their estates, because of the simple and often overlooked fact that in this manner they would find comfort in their seasoned compatriots and their own processes of settlement thus would be smoother.⁴

In Cuba, it was customary to give slaves a Spanish familiar name and, in place of a surname, a designation that referred to the slaves’ tribe, ethnic group, language group, or geographical origin. In historical records, slaves are referred to by their Cuban names rather than their birth names, which in some cases provide scholars with information about where in Africa they came from. But there are also slave designations that simply muddy the waters for researchers. The term “Yoruba,” for example, commonly used today to refer to peoples who live in the present republics of Nigeria, Benin, and Togo, “originated with European linguistic studies in the nineteenth century, and is strictly both anachronistic … and alien to the region.”⁵ Other problematic terms conflate West African coastal regions with ethnicity, due to the fact that the Spanish more often than not tended to place most of African slaves within broad nations, presumably to facilitate their marketing and sales. Thus, it is highly likely that under the term “Carabalí,” for example, Spanish authorities frequently included most of the ethnic groups exported from ports of the Bight of Biafra, such as the Ibibios or the Igbos. The denomination “Mina” was also likely to serve as a broad definition for all slaves—such as the Ashantis or Fantees—who were exported from the Gold Coast and more specifically from the castles of Cape Coast and El Mina.

African ethnicities—and the confusion of scholars who attempt to disentangle them—have been the subject of recent studies. The work of Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, which challenges historians to rethink their understanding of African denominations used throughout the three and a half centuries of transatlantic slave trade, is particularly significant in this respect.⁶ In the Cuban case, authorities, slave owners, travelers, foreign residents, and virtually everybody, including slaves, had preconceived ideas of the particular characteristics of every African ethnic group or “nation.” Although I intend to avoid endorsing such preconceptions, there are reasons to believe that they were often well-founded and therefore worthy of being examined and interpreted.⁷

Throughout this study, one topic remains in the mist: the Islamic background of the slaves brought to Cuba. While African autochthonous religious beliefs have been at the core of several studies about the history of slavery in Cuba, Islam is rarely mentioned. There are no very satisfactory reasons why Islam in Bahia, for example, has been clearly identified and studied while in Cuba it has not. One obvious factor is that Cuban sources barely make any mention of slaves’ Islamic background. But this absence of sources is in itself strange, and even more so if we again compare Cuba and Bahia—two regions with strikingly similar imports of African slaves in regard to ethnic and cultural backgrounds, particularly throughout the first half of the nineteenth century.

Many of the African slaves who arrived on both Bahian or Cuban shores after the turn of the century became enslaved in the interior of the Bight of Benin as a result of the jihad that Shuhn Uthman dan Fodio began in 1804.⁸ The expansion of the Sokoto Caliphate and the collapse of the Oyo Empire were responsible for a sharp increase in exports through the ports of the Bight of Benin in this period. In the Bahian case, travelers, authorities, and even African slaves left a vast array of proofs of their Islamic beliefs. In Cuba, very little, if anything, was recorded.

How to identify Islamic beliefs among Cuban slaves is, then, a rather complicated undertaking. Although it is undeniable that Cuba received slaves from Islamized West African regions, such as the central Sudan or the Mandinga lands, the few testimonies we have—or that we think we have—about their presence are by no means conclusive. Some refer to Lucumí slaves—many of whom were likely the result of the expansion of the Sokoto Caliphate—who never drank alcohol. Other evidence is the product of purely speculative readings and interpretations of African names as they were recorded by the Spanish authorities, such as those of some rebel slaves who participated in the rebellion of 1833 on the cafetal El Salvador. Some of their names seem to have been proper Muslim names, such as Lalani (Lawani), Achumo (Asunmo or Ismail), and Alu (Aliyu).⁹ In the course of my research, I came across another possible Muslim slave, who was referred to as a Mandinga Moro by the Spanish authorities—possibly as a way to define within one term both his ethnic origin and his religious orientation.¹⁰

The abolition of the transatlantic slave trade coincided with the fall of the Oyo Empire, in what is now southwestern Nigeria. As a result, there was an increase in the trade in former subjects of Oyo, who were known as Nagôs in Brazil and Lucumís in Cuba. In both countries, they were respected and renowned for their rebellious temperament.¹¹ The Lucumí slaves transported to Cuba were well-versed in the art of war. Before the arrival of the Europeans, they relied mostly on swords, spears, and bows and arrows. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, when the Empire of Oyo was at the height of its splendor, they had learned to use firearms and horses and had honed their military tactics to perfection. Cavalry played a remarkable role in the rise of the Oyo Empire; horses were used in most of the military campaigns initiated by the Oyo in the eighteenth century. In some cases, as in the invasion of Dahomey in the 1720s, the Oyo army consisted “entirely of cavalry,” and the Oyo cavalry remained “significant” as late as 1823.¹²

The Oyo Empire had a long history of political alliances and coups d’état. According to Robin Law, the greatest territorial extent of the Oyo was achieved after one of these coups, when the Alafin Abiodun seized power from Basorun Gaha in 1774.¹³ Coincidentally, the beginning of the end of Oyo dominance followed another coup d’état, this one carried out against Awole, the successor of Abiodun, in 1796. The “ephemeral greatness” of the empire came close to a terminal collapse in 1817, when the city of Ilorin and the Fulanis—a Muslim pastoral group from the north—allied against the Oyo.¹⁴ From that moment onward, the slave ports of the Bight of Benin, which had formerly traded mostly in subjects from neighboring kingdoms like Nupe, Dahomey, and Borgu, began to increase their exports of Lucumís. The Oyo Empire finally crumbled in 1836 under the pressure of continuous attacks from the north, and in consequence more Oyo subjects were embarked to the New World—mostly to Cuba and Brazil—after that date.¹⁵

Daily life for the subjects of the Oyo Empire was infused with mysticism, which included a belief in life after death. This mysticism was a particularly important religious characteristic of most of the West African slaves who arrived in Cuba in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The pantheistic religion of the Lucumí—known as the Santería in Cuba—was probably one of the richest in Africa. It had an oracle for divination of the future, shrines where gods and ancestors were worshiped and called upon, masquerade ceremonies where the worlds of the living and the dead mixed with each other, and, notably, a “very firm belief” in the reincarnation of souls.¹⁶ To the subjects of the Oyo, the dead were “simply removed temporarily to another sphere.”¹⁷ To contact them, the Lucumí would celebrate masquerades in which they would wear their Egungun costumes. The role of clothes among Oyo subjects should not be underestimated. The proper clothes were essential when going to war, but they were also crucial when the Oyo were contacting their gods and ancestors. According to P. S. O. Aremu, clothes were the “magnetic forces” that drew the living and the dead together.¹⁸

Although the masquerade and the Ifá divination system were central to Lucumí beliefs, worshiping at sacred shrines also constituted an important part of the Lucumí’s cosmological dynamics. Every person was protected by a specific Orisha, and every Orisha had his or her own sacred shrine. Orishas had individual personalities and specific characteristics that defined them. Colors and attributes, for example, separated Yemayá from Oshún, and Oggún from Shangó. Shrines were necessary, a circumstance that might well explain—at least in part—the process of transculturation by which Orishas were worshiped in Catholic churches in various parts of the New World in the guise of Christian saints and virgins.

A similar tale can be told about the Ararás, known in some Caribbean territories as the Aradas, who also hailed from West Africa. Most of the Ararás sent to the Americas belonged to an Ewe-Fon-speaking people who had settled in the former kingdom of Dahomey, which now includes the vast majority of modern Benin and Togo and a part of Ghana.¹⁹ Beginning in the seventeenth century, Ararás were embarked from the most notorious slave ports of the Bight of Benin, namely Whydah, Porto-Novo, and Cotonou, among others. Their religion—or, to be precise, the version of it that developed in the New World—is perhaps the most enduring and popular of all the belief systems brought to the New World by West African peoples. In Dahomey, Voodoo was an established religion with a theological system of ritual worship. The very meaning of the term “Voodoo”—to draw water—reflects the cycle of life: birth, death, and rebirth. Ever since Voodoo played a crucial role in the Haitian Revolution, it has been widely studied by scholars. In Voodoo ceremonies, dancing, singing, drumming, and especially costumes all are extremely important. In addition to spiritual entities called Loas, the Ararás believed in the perpetual existence of the souls of the dead. After people died, their souls remained on earth, offering guidance and help to their relatives.²⁰

During the eighteenth century, Dahomey became one of the biggest and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The African Background of Cuban Slaves
• 2. Homicides, Conspiracies, and Revolts
• 3. Marronage
• 4. Suicides
• 5. Slaves’ Use of The Colonial Legal Framework
• 6. Disguised and Nonviolent Forms of Resistance
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index