Dialogues in Cuban Archaeology

Slavery at a Cuban Coffee Plantation / 191
born slave man or woman. These ethnic labels were products of the slave
trade that loosely correspond to ethnolinguistic groups in Africa. Slave traders
often created these labels on the basis of departure points from which victims
of the transatlantic slave trade were taken. For example, Minas refers to
Elmina, ¤rst a Portuguese and later a Dutch trading post on the Gold Coast,
the Atlantic shore of present-day Ghana. Similarly, “Araras” refers to Fonspeaking
Africans taken from the kingdom of Andrah or Allada on the Slave
Coast, the present-day Republic of Benin. Although many of these ethnic
designations often have little or no historical meaning in Africa, they became
ways in which Africans de¤ned themselves in the Americas and how Europeans
distinguished among them. Africans organized mutual aid and religious
organizations based on these ethnicities throughout Latin America (Singleton
2001a:184n.3). In Cuba, these organizations were known as cabildos de
naciones; in nineteenth-century Cuba some 100 African ethnicities were recognized,
and more than 20 ethnically based cabildos maintained their cultural
identities into the twentieth century (Ortiz 1921). Cabildos were primarily an
urban Afro-Cuban institution, and their in®uence on enslaved Cubans living
on plantations is unclear. Nonetheless, naciones played signi¤cant roles in
ritual performances and other religious activities on plantations, such as funerals
(see, e.g., Barcia Paz 1998:26–28).
The enslaved community at Cafetal del Padre belonged to the following
naciones: 16 Carabalí (Igbo and Ibibo-speaking people of southeastern Nigeria),
17 Congo (Ki Kongo speakers of Angola and the Democratic Republic
of the Congo), 12 Ganga (a Mande-speaking people from Upper Senegal),
12 Lucumí (Yoruba-speaking people of southwestern Nigeria), 5 Maená (a
Mande-speaking people from Senegambia area), 4 Mina (Akan-Ewe peoples
of southern Ghana and Togo), 11 Criolla (born in Cuba). 2 The distribution of
naciones indicates that no one group was in the majority. This situation may
have resulted from deliberate efforts to prevent one group from overpowering
the others and from organizing ethnically based insurrections.
The Informal Slave Economy
Excavations at the El Padre slave village have shed light on the ways in which
enslaved workers participated in independent economic activities. The independent
slave economy included such activities as producing food for themselves
as well as for sale to others; raising livestock; producing ¤nished goods
(e.g., baskets, furniture, or pottery); marketing their own products; and consuming
or saving the proceeds obtained from these activities (Berlin and Mor-