60199616-flight-to-freedom-african-runaways-and-maroons-in-the-americas

120 Flight to Freedom
bands, dedicated more to brigandage than to agriculture. The evidence was
found in the steady growth of robbery on the highways and in the urban
communities, and the concomitant reduction in both the number of permanent
settlements and the frequency of state-authorized Maroon-hunting
expeditions. 10
Another reason for the reduction of hunting expeditions – though not
clearly delineated by La Rosa Corzo – was the growth of anti-slavery sentiment
that frowned upon them. In any event, the first Cuban War of
Independence, which began in the eastern region in 1868, led to the revolutionary
leaders declaring all Maroons free persons and inviting them to join
the revolutionary forces, which many of them did. By the time that this first
war ended in 1878, many enslaved persons had been set free in the eastern
region. The next few years before slavery was abolished throughout the island
witnessed its vast reduction as an institution, as planters reverted to a system
of indentured servitude through the importation of large numbers of poor
people from Spain, the Canary Islands, China and Yucatán.
La Rosa Corzo (2003, 227) lists eighty-two known settlements in the eastern
part of the island from 1740 to the end of slavery, but some of these might
have been counted more than once (since he lists the settlements by time
period rather than by name). However, his list does not include “vagabond
runaways” or armed bands (see chapter 2). This, plus the groups that existed
in other parts of the island, and those in the eastern part that the hunting
expeditions never located or of whose existence they were unaware, must at
least be borne in mind when trying to determine the extent and impact of
marronage on Cuba. Among the main eastern groups that he identifies are El
Portillo, Palenque de la Cruz, Bumba, Maluala, El Frijol (Moa), La Cueva,
San Andrés, Todos Tenemos, Calunga (Kalunga), No Se Sabe, El Cedro, La
Yagruma and Bayamito. He believes that the last of these was the largest,
with some 160 inhabitants (ibid., 248).
The United States generally did not possess large Maroon communities,
though an increasingly large number of enslaved persons became runaways.
Apart from the Underground Railroad, scholars on marronage in that country
focus mainly on the activities in Spanish Florida, and especially the First
and Second Seminole Wars. These wars came as a sequel to the infiltration
of the area by Black fugitives, which began to cause problems for the
enslavers in British Georgia and the Carolinas from the late seventeenth century.
By the 1690s their presence, though still numerically small, had come to