Dialogues in Cuban Archaeology

186 / Singleton
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF CAFETAL DEL PADRE
Cafetal del Padre is located today in Havana Province approximately 75 km
southeast of the City of Havana near the town of Madruga. At an average elevation
of 160 m above sea level, El Padre is situated in a subregion of western
Cuba consisting of rolling hills, plateaus, and low-lying mountains known as
the Alturas de Bejucal-Madruga-Limonar (Nuñez Jiménez 1959:109–114).
This lush terrain is quite scenic; the plantation itself has been described as
“possessing a beautiful natural balcony” (Alvarez Estévez 2001:60), with panoramic
vistas of the surrounding area.
When Cafetal del Padre was operating as a coffee plantation, it was known
as Santa Ana de Viajacas, and the O’Farrills, a distinguished and powerful
family of nineteenth-century Cuba, owned it. Richard O’Farrell (the Irish
surname O’Farrell was later Hispanicized to O’Farrill), the Irish progenitor of
the family, born on the island of Montserrat in the eastern Caribbean, came
to Cuba around 1715 (Franco Ferrán 1986:7). He made his fortune in the slave
trade, and his descendants in turn invested in land and enslaved laborers.
Richard’s son, Juan José, acquired large tracts of land and owned one of the
largest sugar plantations in Cuba during 1780s (Bergad 1990:14). Juan José’s
seventh child, Ignacio O’Farrill y Herrera, a Catholic priest, inherited the tract
of land, approximately 1,000 acres, that became the coffee plantation, as well
as an adjacent potrero (a stock-raising farm) and other landholdings from his
parents (Archivo Nacional de Cuba [ANC] Protocolo de Salinas, 1788; ANC
Escribanía Mayor de la Real Hacienda, legajo 142, No. 2662, 1834). At some
later time, presumably after Ignacio’s death, the cafetal became known simply
as El Padre, meaning “the father” or “the priest.”
In 1829, Ignacio O’Farrill began mortgaging his properties to pay back a
loan of 60,000 pesos he used to develop two sugar plantations, La Concordia,
located in the nearby district of Tapaste, and San Juan de Nepomuceno, located
in the same district as the cafetal (ANC Salinas, 1829, 1262–1263). Ignacio had
dif¤culty repaying these loans, and when he died in 1838 his estate had accumulated
considerable debt. Two probate inventories taken of his estate, one
in 1838 and another in 1841, provide most of the written information about
the operation of the cafetal, including descriptions of the dotación (the slave
population), the number and kinds of plantation buildings, the number of
coffee plants, the types of other cultivated crops, fruit trees, and animals, and
the kinds of furnishings and other household objects left in the great house.
After the padre’s death, the coffee plantation continued to operate on a