Shade-Grown Slavery: The Lives of Slaves on Coffee Plantations in Cuba
224
Shade-Grown Slavery: The Lives of Slaves on Coffee Plantations in Cuba
224Hardcover
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Overview
In this broad, interdisciplinary study, William Van Norman describes how each type of plantation and the amount of manual labor it required directly influenced the nature of slave life in that community. Slaves on coffee plantations lived in a unique context in comparison to that of their fellow slaves on sugar plantations, one that gave them greater flexibility in cultural and artistic creativity. To gain a deeper understanding of plantation slavery in Cuba, Van Norman explores what life and labor was like for coffee slaves and how it was different from what sugar slaves experienced. Shade-Grown Slavery reconstructs their world and in turn deconstructs the picture we now have of Cuba in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Ultimately, Shade-Grown Slavery reveals the lives of enslaved Africans on Cuban coffee plantations and shows how they were able to maintain and transform their cultural traditions in spite of slavery.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780826519146 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Vanderbilt University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/28/2013 |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.30(w) x 10.10(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Shade-Grown Slavery
The Lives of Slaves on Coffee Plantations in Cuba
By William C. Van Norman Jr.
Vanderbilt University Press
Copyright © 2013 Vanderbilt University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8265-1916-0
CHAPTER 1
Café con azúcar
The Expansion of the Slave Population and Plantations
Whatever the circumstances of the planter may be, in point of fortune, I would by no means advise him to set out with a great number of negroes.... Six, or at most twelve male negroes, with one or two women, will be found sufficient to make the first essay. —Pierre-Joseph Laborie
On a December morning in 1828, as the day dawned, the plantation bell on the cafetal (coffee plantation) known as "the Paciencia" rang out, calling the slaves to work. Pio mandingo and Gertrudis mandingo were among the workers who came out to learn what tasks they were to perform that day. It was late fall—harvest time—so all attention was focused on bringing in the crop, a task that required all hands available. The mayoral (overseer) charged each able-bodied worker with bringing in two baskets of coffee cherries, a typical amount on a day such as this. Men, women, and children headed out to the fields to pick the ripe, red fruit from the coffee bushes. The men picked fruit from the tops, the women from the middle branches, and the children from the lowest arms of the bushes. As their baskets filled, Pio and the other men carried the heavy loads back to the processing area for sorting, washing, and drying. Once the quota was filled for the day, the newest harvest was put to soak so the coffee beans could be extracted from their pulpy husks. After completing their assignments, Pio and Gertrudis, along with their fellow workers, had time for tasks of their own choosing, such as tending their gardens or making some item to sell.
This was a typical day in a routine that changed with the seasons. This snapshot of daily life, while mundane, reveals a rich complexity and a distinctive way of life unique to the cafetal. Pio mandingo and Gertrudis mandingo, husband and wife, lived on the cafetal Paciencia during the 1820s and 1830s. The couple were among dozens who were enslaved on the farm. To the casual observer, their lives seem rigorous and simple, and like the lives of agricultural people everywhere, their existence was marked by regularity and a humble way of being. Thus, in many ways, the typical view of these slaves' existence is accurate, but a closer examination reveals lives and a social order with layers of complexity that were the result of the circumstances of their enslavement. The patterns they lived followed a rhythm regulated by the seasons and the crop they labored to produce; thus, their day-to-day activities shifted over the course of the year in regular ways. But their lives were affected not only by work; they also dwelled in a community of fellow workers situated within a paternalistic and patriarchal structure that defined the broader plantation experience. Collectively, they had to contend with the will and the demands of the slaveholder and his agents, who actively sought to shape the workforce both mentally and demographically, with the hope of maximizing production. All the while, Pio and Gertrudis, and others like them, attempted to create the conditions of a life with some sense of normality within the context of the plantation that was their home. To begin to understand their experiences, we need to go back to an earlier time to see how the system of plantation agriculture developed in Cuba. It was the rapid expansion of this complex of elements that swept them and tens of thousands of others like them from their African homelands onto farms across the island.
Pio and Gertrudis worked and lived on the Paciencia alongside fifty to sixty other captives at any one time. There were hundreds more on nearby farms, and still thousands of others on the hundreds of plantations that sprang up across the landscape of western Cuba during the great boom. Pio and Gertrudis's story was unique, but they also shared commonalities typical of the laborers on hundreds of cafetales in the region. They were but two souls who were part of a great rising tide of forced migration that would grow to three quarters of a million people before it began to subside. The presence of this multitude would forever change the face of Cuba, reconfiguring both the rural and urban landscapes and transforming the cultural moorings of the colony in ways that have continued to reverberate. The labor of Pio and Gertrudis helped to transform Cuba into a rich colony with a diverse economy, and the lives they struggled to define created a new and complex culture that has come to define the island and all its people.
Pio and Gertrudis were living on the Paciencia and available to work on that particular morning as a result of the actions and decisions of numerous people who had shaped the world in which they lived. The planter who claimed ownership over them, Alonso Benigno Muñoz, was the most immediate influence, but there were also countless others past and present of whom they had little or no knowledge. These individuals included officials in Havana and Madrid, the slave traders who had brought them across the Atlantic, and those in Africa who had sold them into the Atlantic trading system. Based on their reported ethnicity, the trail could even include religious and political leaders in west Africa. There were numerous struggles during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the region known as "the Senegambia," as various factions fought to control people and territory. Attempts at conversion and conquest between colonialist trading outposts, traditional religious practitioners, and Muslims resulted in many people being swept into the transatlantic slave trade. This is likely how Pio and Gertrudis were enslaved and brought to Cuba.
Muñoz acquired Pio during the 1820s to work on his cafetal as a general laborer—what was known as a negro del campo. The work Pio and others did on the farm varied depending on the season and also changed over time in relation to the age or stage of development of the plantation. In other words, the work in constructing a new farm was distinct from the labor on a plantation that had reached production age and different still from a farm that had matured fully. The records suggest that Pio was acquired after the Paciencia had reached production stage; as a result, his experience of the farm would have been different from those who had built the farm during the period of plantation expansion. The beginnings of the so-called plantation boom can be traced to the late 1780s and it grew in magnitude through the first several decades of the nineteenth century, but the decisions that facilitated the period of rapid growth stretch back to the first half of the eighteenth century. The cafetal Paciencia was similar to the hundreds of other cafetales that had been established during the period of expansion southwestward from Havana in the region known as the vuelta abajo. The eastern end of the vuelta abajo was largely devoted to coffee cultivation.
Coffee was also grown in hilly areas in every direction outside of Havana, although the greatest concentration of cafetales was southwest of the city. Coffee cultivators established their new farms almost entirely within the jurisdicción (province) of Havana. The area populated by these plantations stretched from Callajabos, a few kilometers west of the municipio (municipality) of Ar-Havana temisa, approximately sixty kilometers to the southwest of Havana, all the way to Matanzas, one hundred kilometers to the east of Havana on the north coast.
The core region in which planters established their cafetales and that became the often romanticized coffee zone was on a strip of elevated land approximately twenty kilometers from north to south and roughly sixty kilometers from its western extremities to the east. The informally defined district included important clusters of cafetales throughout the region, from the town of Callajabos on its western edge to Santiago de las Vegas in the east. The most well-known locale and the zone of some of the most vigorous activity was at the western end of the coffee-growing region, near the eastern end of the famous tobacco-growing territory. It was this confluence of agricultural zones that was known as the vuelta abajo. Many of the important cafetales and spaces devoted to coffee production were along the camino real á vueltabajo (main road to the vuelta abajo) around the town of Guanajay and in the old corral known as San Marcos (which later became the municipio of Artemisa). Other important centers of coffee production located within the western coffee region included Wajay, Alquízar, San Antonio de los Baños, Güira de Melena, and Bejucal. This main area in which the cafetales were concentrated included approximately twelve hundred square kilometers of land. There were also two notable areas of coffee cultivation, often thought of mainly as zones of sugar production, that lay just beyond the main region of cafetales. Farmland surrounding the towns of Güines and Matanzas, home to many nearby ingenios (sugar plantations), also held numerous cafetales and a thriving coffee element as a part of their local economies.
Muñoz founded his plantation in San Marcos and developed it in the same fashion as many of his contemporaries, drawing on the lessons of those who had established the first cafetales in the region. Those earlier pioneers began the process that would develop into a coffee boom within a few decades. The conditions that led to the creation of coffee farms in western Cuba were not accidental, but generated by a concerted effort by government and commercial leaders in Madrid as well as in the colonial capital of Havana. The origins of coffee cultivation in Cuba extend back to the early decades of the eighteenth century and emerged out of the desires of both leaders in Spain and colonial subjects on the island to increase the prosperity of the colony. Each group had distinct motives but similar aims, which converged to create the legal and commercial framework that enabled the expansion of plantation agriculture on the island, resulting in the rapid growth that began in the 1790s.
Coffee arrived in Cuba in 1748, when José María de la Torre brought seeds from the French colony of Saint Domingue and founded the first cafetal in what is now Wajay, southwest of Havana. Production of the bean expanded slowly and it began to be exported in significant amounts only around 1790. In that year Saint Domingue produced over half of the coffee in the world, exporting some thirty-three thousand tons, while Cuba exported only ninety-three tons. From that first Cuban cafetal would grow a vast system that, for a few decades in the nineteenth century, would rival the sugar kingdom in the wealth it created and in the numbers of slaves held. In 1790 there were fewer than ten cafetales in western Cuba, but by 1804 the number had grown to at least eighty-four. Production had risen from less than a hundred tons to nearly one thousand tons in the space of fourteen years. The number of plantations continued to expand dramatically, so that by the year 1841 a survey of farms counted 582 coffee estates producing beans within the jurisdiction of Havana. While it may seem that this rapid growth might be attributable to the collapse of the export economy of neighboring Saint Domingue following the Haitian Revolution, which began in 1791, the reasons are actually much more complex. The development of the coffee sector can be traced to reforms that began in Spain a hundred years earlier. Cuban expansion would not have been possible in the 1790s unless planters had been ready to take advantage of the situation when opportunity presented itself. In fact, the groundwork had been laid decades before.
Following the triumph of the Bourbons in the War of Succession, Philip V began to institute a series of planned policy changes in Spain to strengthen the monarchy and centralize control of the war-torn kingdom. The measures he instituted were modeled after earlier reforms successfully enacted in France. The first step was the revocation of fueros (specific privileges granted to the upper class and the military), through the institution of the Nueva Planta in Aragón, which included Valencia and Catalonia. This laid the groundwork for the intendancy system and later reforms in Spain that would eventually be carried to the New World. The aim of these reforms was to subdue opposition to Philip's rule by centralizing and increasing control over regions farther afield. The destabilizing of traditional power bases allowed Philip and his coterie to institute new courts and military rule, and install new leadership in the outlying districts, thus solidifying Bourbon control over a wider area of Spain. The success of those first steps led to the relocation in 1717 of the Casa de Contratación (House of Commerce) to Cádiz and to codification of the intendancy system. This was necessary to wrest control of the vital overseas trade system out of the hands of entrenched interests in Seville. In 1720 Philip ordered the reorganization of the Council of the Indies, creating more centralized control over Spanish America and the wealth the colonies generated. These moves were initially successful, but their effectiveness was ultimately limited by Philip's own weakness as a ruler. Once Ferdinand VI ascended to the throne, the early reforms found a new advocate in his secretary, Cenón de Somodevilla, the Marquis of La Ensenada, and from 1749 it became clear that the restructuring was permanently in effect.
When Charles III ascended to the throne of Spain in August 1759, the pace and commitment to reform increased. As his administration progressed, under the leadership of minister Leopoldo di Grigorio, the Marqués de Esquilache, there emerged a broader and more dedicated plan to reshape the empire. Charles reversed Ferdinand's policy of neutrality in the Seven Years War and entered the conflict on the side of France. This would prove to be a mistake and added to the losses Spain had suffered in the earlier War of Jenkins's Ear (1739–1741) with the British. Losses during the conflict were felt not only on the European front but also were dramatically revealed in the British occupation of Havana in 1762–1763. The years of economic difficulty that began under Philip V had continued under succeeding years of Bourbon rule as Spain absorbed serious blows during many years of war. There were tangible losses as a result of British aggression against Spanish territory on the Iberian peninsula and in the New World. The British had attacked eastern Cuba and the northern South American coast during the War of Jenkins's Ear and had returned during the Seven Years War to gain a foothold on Spanish lands, first seizing Gibraltar and later capturing Havana.
Once the leaders negotiated peace and the British returned Havana to Spanish sovereignty, Charles and Esquilache felt compelled to act decisively to improve defensive capabilities both at home and overseas. They decided that the best course of action was to begin by extending the administrative and judicial reforms begun under previous administrations in Spain. As with the earlier moves, this was a way not only to increase and improve control but also to augment tax revenues flowing to the Crown. They reasoned that expanding the revenues of the state would finance necessary growth of the military and its infrastructure. What followed were the first of what have come to be known as the Bourbon reforms but in fact were the logical extensions of the reform processes begun decades earlier under Philip V at the conclusion of the War of Succession.
Following the Peace of Paris in 1763, Esquilache, with the authority and approval of Charles, began a vigorous campaign of change in Cuba. The first stage was to increase security. The court dispatched the Catalano Ambrosio Funes de Villalpando Abarca de Bolea, the conde de Ricla (count of Ricla), to take control of Havana from the British under the terms of peace and to begin to remake the military detachment in the colony. Ricla had proposed to the king that the garrison in Cuba be modeled after the militia system that had proved successful against the Austrians in the struggle over the Two Sicilies. As Charles had realized victory in that instance, he agreed to the plan, and Ricla undertook the task with the aid of Field Marshal Alejandro O'Reilly. Within the space of two years, Ricla, O'Reilly, and Esquilache reshaped the military in Cuba, and Esquilache subsequently promulgated this new system through much of Spanish America after 1769.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Shade-Grown Slavery by William C. Van Norman Jr.. Copyright © 2013 Vanderbilt University Press. Excerpted by permission of Vanderbilt University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: The Crop Mattered 1
Part I Roots: The Expansion of Coffee and the Slave Population
1 Café con azúcar: The Expansion of the Slave Population and Plantations 7
2 Transformations: Building Frameworks and Structures 34
Part II Branches: The Negotiations of Life on the Cafetal 63
3 Space Is the Place: Intentions and Subversion of Design 69
4 Under Cover of Night: Religious Practices 90
5 Buyers and Sellers: Work and Economy of the Slaves 109
6 When Everyday Actions Escalate: Resistance, Rebellions, and Cultural Complexity 121
Part III Harvest
Conclusion: Performing Culture and the Appropriation of Identifications 139
Appendix A Demographic Data 147
Appendix B Cafetales 149
Notes 155
Bibliography 191
Index 201