Dialogues in Cuban Archaeology

192 / Singleton
gan 1991:1). On many of the British islands, enslaved people traded items
through institutionalized markets, held typically on Sundays. The ability of
enslaved laborers to buy and sell items was much more restricted in Cuba than
on other Caribbean islands. Provision ground products had a limited market
and were often sold to the plantation itself (Scott 1985:149–150). Similarly,
some slave-purchased items were acquired from stores established on the plantation
for the purpose of selling goods to the slave community. These stores
are better known in the second half of the nineteenth century on large sugar
estates (Scott 1985:194). The extent to which similar stores existed earlier on
coffee plantations is unknown, and no store is mentioned or listed on the
inventories of Cafetal del Padre. Reverend Abiel Abbott describes such a shop
at the coffee plantation Angerona in 1828: “He [the slaveowner] furnishes a
shop in the apartment of the building next to the mill, with everything they
wish to buy that is proper to them; cloth, cheap and showy, garments gay and
warm, crockery; beads, crosses, guano, or the American palm that they make
neat hats for themselves, little cooking pots, etc. He puts everything at low
prices, and no peddler is permitted to show his wares on the estate” (Abbott
1829:141).
Although this plantation shop may have been unique to Angerona, Abbott’s
description offers useful insights for understanding Cuba’s informal
slave economy in several ways. First, it identi¤es the kinds of objects enslaved
Cubans purchased on plantations. Second, it indicates that traveling peddlers
were another, and perhaps the primary, source for slave-purchased goods.
And, third, it hints at the in®uence exerted by slaveholders on the selection of
items made available to enslaved people. Therefore, the degree of slave choice
in making purchases was perhaps more limited on Cuban plantations than in
other slave societies.
Despite the utility of Abbott’s description of slave-purchased objects, it
provides a lens into only one kind of economic exchange, the plantation shop
in Cuba’s informal slave economy. Presumably there was a range of economic
exchanges, including purchasing from traveling peddlers, rural stores and taverns
and exchanges with other enslaved people. Objects available from a plantation
shop were most likely those that met with the slaveholder’s approval.
Yet archaeological investigations at El Padre slave village yielded remains of
items slaveholders were unlikely to approve, such as alcoholic beverages. According
to Laird Bergad, authorities in Matanzas province complained constantly
about enslaved persons purchasing liquor illegally (1990:238).
Tobacco pipes also occur in large quantities at El Padre and, like alcoholic