Runaway Slave Settlements in Cuba: Resistance and Repression(Envisioning Cuba)

Combining archaeological and historical methods, Gabino La Rosa Corzo provides the most detailed and accurate available account of the runaway slave settlements ( palenques ) that formed in the inaccessible mountain chains of eastern Cuba from 1737 to 1850, decades before the end of slavery on the island. The traces that remain of these communities provide important clues to historical processes such as slave resistance and emancipation, anticolonial insurgency, and the emergence of a free peasantry. Some of the communities developed into thriving towns that still exist today. La Rosa challenges the claims of previous scholars and demonstrates how romanticized the communities have become in historical memory. In part by using detailed maps drawn on site, La Rosa shows that palenques were smaller and fewer in number than previously thought and they contained mostly local, rather than long-distance, fugitives. In addition, the residents were less aggressive and violent than myth holds, often preferring to flee rather than fight a system of oppression that was even more effective and organized than generally supposed. La Rosa's study illuminates many social and economic issues related to the African diaspora in the Caribbean, with particular focus on slavery, resistance, and independence. This translation makes the book available in English for the first time. |La Rosa Corzo corrects earlier accounts of runaway slave communities in the remote mountains of eastern Cuba that romanticized and exaggerated the influence of the runaways. The author, a Cuban anthropologist, depicts localized communities that were non-aggressive, creolized, and less oppressed than was generally supposed. La Rosa Corzo updates and revises our knowledge of the palenques in the Spanish Caribbean.

About the Author :
Gabino La Rosa Corzo is a researcher at the Center for Anthropological Study at the University of Havana. Translator Mary Todd lives in Havana.

Review :

"A notable effort. . . . Addresses relatively unknown aspects of slavery with a refined, complete, and interdisciplinary methodology that combines the tools of history, anthropology, archaeology, and contributes new knowledge to all three. . . . An excellent and important study." -- H-Atlantic

"Contributes to scholarly understanding of not only the nature of slavery, but the ethnic identity of those slaves who lived in these settlements." -- CHOICE

"Culling a wealth of information from 28 slave hunters' diaries . . . the author . . . offers new insights into escaped slave communities as a form of resistance. . . . The rich analysis and detailed descriptions make this book an invaluable contribution for understanding nineteenth-century Cuba." -- Americas

"This is a detailed and well-informed study that helpfully contributes to the understanding of slave resistance and marronage." -- American Historical Review

"This is a solidly researched and original work that makes an important contribution to the study of resistance to slavery. Although focusing on the peculiar features of resistance and repression in Cuba's Oriente province, Gabino La Rosa Corzo sketches in a cogent new overview of the chronology and trajectory of Cuban slave resistance that offers a useful critique of previous writing and carries the subject to a new level. He combines archaeology, oral history, and hitherto unused diaries of slavecatchers to explain the evolution and demise of cimarronaje and its interaction with government repression. It is a dramatic story of the increasingly relentless hunt through difficult terrain of people seeking freedom and surviving by their wits." -- David Geggus, University of Florida