Dialogues in Cuban Archaeology

Slavery at a Cuban Coffee Plantation / 187
reduced scale with one-fourth of the slave force utilized by Ignacio O’Farrill.
In 1844 a hurricane destroyed the coffee works, and the remaining enslaved
community was relocated to the sugar plantation San Juan de Nepomuceno,
where 40 laborers from the cafetal had been placed earlier (ANC Escribanía
Archivo de Galletti, legajo 240, 1838–1839). From 1844 to 1853, La Real Hacienda
(the Royal Treasury) of Cuba took over the administration of Ignacio
O’Farrill’s estate until the debts and back taxes were settled. The sugar plantations
were eventually sold, and coffee cultivation was never restored at the
cafetal. At some later point, the coffee plantation ceased to exist and was subdivided
into sitios, or small subsistence farms (ANC Gobierno General, legajo
652, expediente 27528, 1862).
ARCHAEOLOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS
AT CAFETAL DEL PADRE
Ruins of three structures made of mampostería—a construction material consisting
of stone, rubble, and a lime-based mortar—are located on the site of
El Padre today (Figure 10.1). These structures include the great house, a wall
enclosure surrounding the site of the slave village, trapezoidal in shape (104 m
on its longest side and 71.5 m on the widest) and measuring 3.35 m in height,
and a specialized building of unknown function tentatively designated as an
almacén (warehouse). Archaeological testing has been undertaken around
each of the ruins, but excavations within the slave village have been the primary
focus of the archaeological research thus far (Figure 10.5). Probate inventories
of the plantation (ANC Galletti, legajo 245, expediente 1, 1838–1839;
ANC Galletti, legajo 934, expediente 6, 1841) con¤rm that the area within the
wall enclosure was indeed the site of the slave village containing from 30 to
45 bohíos—wood frame buildings, walled with cane, clay, or clapboards and
roofed with thatch. 1 The bohíos at Cafetal del Padre used for housing enslaved
workers were constructed of guano y embarrado, mud- or clay-walled buildings
with thatched roofs of palm, while those used for outbuildings such as
the overseer’s kitchen and the chicken house were made of guano y estantes de
madera (clapboards) with palm roofs (ANC Galletti, legajo 934, expediente
6). Although excavations have not yielded archaeological remains of preserved
mud or daub as has been the case in other excavations of clay-walled slave
dwellings (Armstrong 1999; Wheaton and Garrow 1985), the small amount of
recovered nails suggests that wood was not the primary material used to build
the walls of the slave bohíos.