Runaway Slave Settlements in Cuba: Resistance and Repression

Introduction

The eastern region of Cuba is very important for the study of runaway slave settlements, since it is the part of the island’s territory that, it is supposed, contained the largest number of those settlements. Therefore, I took that region as a starting point in studying this form of slave resistance in greater detail, testing the truth of those suppositions and creating the basis for showing the common features of such settlements. The social phenomenon of runaway slave settlements took the form of small, almost inaccessible rural hamlets that abounded in Cuba during most of the period when the island’s economy was based on slave plantations.

An earlier work (La Rosa Corzo 1986, 86–123) set forth the need for fieldwork and even for use of the resources offered by archaeology and ethnography in putting together a reliable historical reconstruction of the system of clandestine settlements, which were continually attacked by the colonial authorities and by the slave owners. The studies on this topic that have been made public in Cuba so far are based entirely on the information provided by a part of the abundant colonial documentation, but the critical approach required in historical work has been utterly lacking; moreover, some of those who were interested in this subject wrote their works as literary fiction. In order to write the history of this social phenomenon of runaway slave settlements, known in Cuba as palenques, I had to clear away enormous obstacles that had been created by fantasy and the lack of historical precision.

Therefore, while taking the first steps in fieldwork—which is important, though complementary—I based my interpretation of the subject on as many documents as possible; my goal was to propose conceptual definitions that would make it possible to break through the wall raised by the positivist approach that has prevailed in this sphere of historical research up until now. This last aspect is of cardinal importance. The line of work that has been adopted lacks a language of its own, an adequate formulation of the research done. The authors who have written on this topic in Cuba have not used a common terminology—which, I believe, has led to a lack of clarity in the results attained. The use of the same term in identifying different concepts or several terms for defining the same concept is the most common defect in the studies made on this topic.

A large number of documentary sources have not been used previously—such as the diaries or notebooks in which the slavehunters and authorities recorded military operations they had engaged in against vagabond runaway slaves and those living in palenques in Cuba. When such sources were taken into consideration (see appendix 1), knowledge of the repressive system that had been created to oppose runaways was increased, and the number of known runaway slave settlements and the amount of information about them were considerably increased, as well. Thus, thanks to the information contained in the notebooks of the captains of the bands and commandants of the militias that went after runaways and attacked the palenques,¹ it has been possible to discover the most important characteristics of the lives of the slaves who, after escaping, joined together and established settlements in isolated areas in order to remain free.

As had been supposed and as this study corroborates, the eastern region of the island was where this form of slave resistance was the strongest and most widespread—which made it necessary to create a repressive system that differed considerably from the one used on the rest of the island against this same form of slave resistance. This book seeks neither to present a history of the eastern region of Cuba nor to explore all the ways in which the slaves expressed their lack of conformity with their lot. The former would require a much longer, more encompassing work in which the economic, political, and social aspects would have to be taken up from a viewpoint that could explore the complex mechanisms of colonial society through which various socioeconomic formations were manifested. The latter would imply examining the varied forms of slave resistance and rebelliousness, such as suicide, running away and becoming vagabonds, and uprisings by all the slaves on a single plantation- manifestations or forms that are not included in this book. The present work focuses instead on the runaway slaves’ establishment of settlements in isolated areas, where, in many cases, they managed to live and defend themselves against the continual attacks to which they were subjected.

Here the reader will find descriptions of previously ignored real-life happenings that I have culled from meticulous colonial documents in order to reveal the general and particular aspects of this subject. I have also tried to get to the bottom of the problem—showing that the social phenomenon of the palenque was really expressed as a process—by seeking its genesis, explaining its development and decline, bringing out the social relations of colonial society, and assessing this particular form of slave resistance as a system consisting of many factors and incidents that may at first appear to be unrelated. The form of slave resistance described in this book is simply one of the many ways in which slaves struggled, and, even though not inclusive, it contributes to a clearer understanding of the history of slavery in Cuba.

As a specific form of slave resistance, runaway slave settlements were, for several centuries, one of the thorniest problems with which the colonial power structures were beset. This study on the palenques in Cuba should lead to other studies that will bring out the regional characteristics of the problem, since this book focuses only on the easternmost part of the island. Therefore, comparisons on how the phenomenon was expressed in different regions are, for the moment, of a limited nature. In order to compare specific and general aspects of this subject throughout the island, one would first need monographic studies to facilitate a historical synthesis of the facts and characteristics prevailing in each region.

Several aspects are crucial for a true understanding of the palenques: the geographic location of the clandestine hamlets created by the runaway slaves, the elements that upheld their precarious economy, their demographic density, their greater concentration in certain areas, the most common tactics used in their defense, the places from which the people living in them came, and the ways in which those settlements were adapted to meet the changes that were made in the repressive system created to crush them. It is also important to note that this specific form of slave resistance, although expressed throughout the island, did not attain the same level or the same notoriety in all regions.

This last point can be inferred from the regional variations in the repressive system, a point that escaped previous studies on this topic, in which the hunting down of runaway slaves was described as similar in all geographic-economic regions, especially after the creation of the Royal Consulate, or Board of Development, in 1794. Working from its seat in Havana through its consular representatives in the main centers in the rest of the country, that institution directed and administered the network that hunted down, captured, and returned runaway slaves to their owners. In the western and central parts of the island, bands of men who were paid a fixed wage to make daily tours of the areas assigned to them were in charge of bringing back runaway slaves and destroying their settlements. This policy, which led to the creation of a large number of bands of slavehunters, shows that the repressive system in the western and central parts of the island reflected the fact that those areas contained large numbers of vagabond runaway slaves.

In the eastern part of the island, however, those operations were not carried out on a permanent basis, and the bands of slavehunters were far from small. There, large slavehunting militias of civilians and military personnel were formed to comb the areas containing runaway slave settlements for two or three months at a time. It is clear that those operations were aimed mainly against the groups of runaways who established fortified settlements in isolated areas—not vagabond runaways, who stayed near the plantations.

Therefore, I believe that, in Cuba, the historical reconstruction of the system of runaway slave settlements should begin in the eastern region of the island, the only part of its territory in which the repressive system took a different form. The transcription and comparison of diaries concerning operations in the western, central, and eastern regions made it possible to confirm what had been guessed: the existence of a different strategy and tactics in the Eastern Jurisdiction. Those notebooks, in which everything that happened to the bands or slavehunting militias was recorded, show which geographic areas had the most incidents and when the problem was most acute.

A detailed study of twenty-eight slavehunters’ diaries referring to different parts of the island and a large number of the colonial documents related to this subject confirmed that the main form of active slave resistance in the Vuelta Abajo region, in the westernmost part of the island, was the formation of bands of vagabond runaway slaves.

Likewise, despite economic and geographic differences, something similar occurred on the plains of Puerto Principe (now Camagüey). However, in the Matanzas area, which had many sugarcane plantations and a higher concentration of slaves, even though there were many vagabond runaway slaves and runaway slave settlements at one time in history, slave uprisings were the main form of protest. But, as I have already said, the monographic method should precede the comparative, which is why I concentrated on studying runaway slave settlements in the eastern region as a starting point for future comparisons.

In line with what is set forth above, I must describe the system of concepts used in this book. The confusion that exists concerning the most common terms employed to date in theoretical discussions and studies makes it absolutely necessary to relate, describe precisely, and assign hierarchy to the terms used in this presentation. Therefore, I propose the following definitions of the forms of slave resistance,² which were made on the basis of the essential distinction of the variants and a detailed analysis of analogies and differences and also on the basis of their connections with external elements or other factors. This model was used for the study and tabulation of the data contained in the works that were consulted.

Slaves reacted in different ways to the cruel exploitation to which they were subjected, depending on the conditions of their environment, personal and ethnic characteristics, level of development, and social awareness. Thus, they adopted different attitudes or channeled their actions toward different goals.

I propose the concept of passive resistance to describe the series of acts through which slaves expressed their unhappiness with and held back their incorporation in the system in a very elementary or primary way. This kind of resistance includes failure to do the work assigned, the breaking of equipment and tools, a conscious brake on productivity, resistance to work, and even suicide—the most desperate form of resistance slaves employed, not only to find escape but also, in some cases, to harm their owners’ interests. Overseers, managers, and owners—the people most closely linked to the slaves—used physical and moral chastisement to repress all expressions of this kind, both to punish those who committed infractions and to keep the captured runaways and other slaves from committing crimes in the future. Therefore, punishments were almost always administered publicly, in front of all the slaves on the plantation. Suicide was punished with the help of Christian morality, but preventive actions were also carried out on occasion. Father J. B. Labat described one of these methods used in the Antilles: It was that of cutting off the head and hands of those of his blacks who had hanged themselves and placing them in an iron cage suspended from a tree in his yard, because the blacks believed that, when they were buried, spirits would come and take their bodies back to their own country ([1772] 1979, 52).

Thus, the rest of the slaves were pressured not to commit suicide because they believed that the caged heads and hands would keep them from going back to Africa. This and many other methods were used against this form of passive resistance. The incidents caused by this kind of resistance always had a very local character in Cuba.

The concept of active resistance includes the three main ways in which slaves put up tenacious resistance against the system that oppressed them. Each of the forms in this category expressed a different level of the collective nature of the protests and gave rise to a different response by the colonial government in its efforts to eliminate it.

The first level in this kind of resistance was that of vagabond runaway slaves and consisted of flight by one or a very few slaves from the plantation or estate on which they were exploited. In 1796, when the first regulations specifically punishing this form of slave resistance were promulgated, the difference between the concept of vagabond runaway slaves and that of runaways living in a settlement was clearly established. In Cuba, this makes it inadmissible to use the former term for both phenomena or to use other terms for the same purpose. According to those regulations, a vagabond runaway slave was a slave or slaves who are found three leagues [roughly eight miles] from the plantation on which they live and work or one and a half leagues [about four miles] from the fields where they labor, without a document issued by their owner, overseer, or administrator (Real Consulado/Junta de Fomento 1796, 6), whereas runaway slaves living in settlements were those who joined together in groups of more than seven—a concept that was amplified later on with the constant practice of hunting them down. Thus, a document dating from the mid-nineteenth century states that the term vagabond runaway slave is applied, by antonomasia, to a fugitive black slave who wanders through the countryside (Erenchun 1856, 986); runaway slaves living in settlements were the fugitive slaves or slaves who had rebelled and who joined together for strength, choosing mountain locations that are difficult of access and working the land (Pichardo 1976, 458).

At that time it was also made very clear that, whereas a runaway slave settlement, or palenque, was a place where a subsistence agricultural economy was being developed, a temporary settlement of runaways slaves, or ranchería—a term that appears with great frequency in the slavehunters’ diaries and that many confuse with the runaway slave settlements—was simply a group of rude huts providing temporary shelter for fugitive slaves.

Whereas vagabond runaway slaves might be hunted down and captured by anyone, no matter what his class, the runaways living in settlements could be attacked only by the territorial authorities or other persons authorized to do so by the Higher Civil Government (Real Consulado/Junta de Fomento 1846, 4, 9). Even though some runaway slaves traveled great distances and the repressive system created island-wide networks, most of those runaway communities were a regional phenomenon, operating in a very local way in certain regions, where each territorial division or jurisdiction had different problems and its own resources for repressing them.

There was another category in addition to the vagabond runaway slaves and runaway slaves living in settlements, however. This third group—midway between the other two, if you will—appeared with great frequency in the documents of the period but has not been included in earlier studies made in Cuba. This specific form of active resistance was that of armed bands of runaway slaves.

Each armed band of runaway slaves kept on the move through isolated areas, occasionally spending the night in a cave or temporary settlement of runaway slaves. These runaways did not engage in agriculture but lived by hunting, fishing, bartering, and—especially—stealing. Such groups were very numerous in the western part of the island; several famous ones in Vuelta Abajo roamed between the Cuzco Hills and the Cajío and Batabanó Swamps. The band headed by José Dolores, which scourged some plantations near Matanzas in the 1840s, was notorious.³

There were several groups of this kind in the eastern region, as well. According to the statements of a woman runaway whom Santiago Guerra captured at the El Cedro runaway slave settlement in the Sierra Maestra in 1842, the blacks there had formed two bands of fourteen men each that kept on the march separately in order to elude the bands and militias of slavehunters (Archivo Nacional de Cuba [hereafter cited as ANC], Asuntos Políticos [hereafter cited as AP], leg. 41, no. 38). That same year, Leandro Melgarez, who headed the slavehunting militia that had gone out from Manzanillo to operate in the Sierra Maestra, reported the existence of two other bands of runaways: one of thirty members, under Lorenzo, and the other of twenty-two members, commanded by a man called Elias (ANC, Miscelánea de libros [hereafter cited as ML], no. 7,531).

The armed bands of runaway slaves nearly always stayed in a single territory, which they knew like the back of their hand, and so managed to elude the continual persecution to which they were subjected. I believe that groups of runaways whose settlements had been attacked or who lived in areas that did not offer much safety for forming permanent settlements adopted this form of active resistance, which was of a basically tactical and temporary nature.

A palenque, or runaway slave settlement, was the socioeconomic unit in which a group of runaway slaves tried to live together. The action of seeking refuge in those isolated settlements that were subjected to attacks has been known since the eighteenth century as apalencamiento.The concept of the runaway slave settlement implies the existence of rudimentary crops at that place. When there were not any such crops, the place was referred to as a ranchería, or temporary settlement of runaway slaves. On occasion, the rancherías offered shelter to armed bands of runaway slaves, and many of them were also used occasionally by groups of runaways who lived in settlements when they went out in search of certain foods, such as the honey from wild bee hives. It is necessary to distinguish between these two concepts, not only to understand the contents of the slavehunters’ diaries of operations and to establish quantitative and qualitative differences between the various forms of slave resistance but also to explain the level of development of the runaway slaves’ settlements and the regional differences of that phenomenon.

Some of the many slave rebellions that took place in Cuba have been studied, as have some of the runaway slave settlements. Franco (1973) even put together a historical synthesis of several forms of slave resistance. However, the necessary differences between them have not always been established, and consequently there is a great deal of confusion, not only in understanding what happened but also regarding the validity of the opinions expressed. And, far from contributing to a correct historical assessment, this type of work has raised doubts about the subject matter described. Therefore, it is even more necessary than ever to undertake separate monographic studies of each of the forms of slave resistance.

In addition, the regional expressions of these forms need to be differentiated. Even though it is not advisable to establish categorical differences in the way of life and conditions of the slaves on the island based on the regions in which they were exploited—which might tend to hinder understanding of the common features of the problem throughout the island’s territory—it is necessary to point out that some elements defined differences in the system of exploitation, which in turn were reflected in the slaves’ living conditions and therefore in their reactions, generalized regionally.

In the western part of the island, where large plantation economies based on slavery predominated, the proportion of the slave to free population was always at very shocking levels, and there were very few large, unexploited regions that were isolated geographically.

In the central and eastern parts of the island, however, a cattle-raising economy predominated. In addition, small areas were planted to tobacco and still smaller ones to sugarcane and coffee. This resulted in some differences in how the slaves were exploited and in the relations between those in power and those subordinated to them, but it never meant that the slaves did not rebel; rather, some forms of rebellion were more common than others. The economic situation also affected the character of rebellion. If other factors—such as the population density, terrain, immigration, and racial mixing, which were different in each territory—are also taken into account, it is only to be expected that these expressions should have been slightly different in different regions. The diaries of operations against runaway slaves in each region contain data and anecdotes that express the more general characteristics of the problem, but they also include descriptions of the specific characteristics imposed by the terrain, the economy, production, the level of development of the slave plantation, and even the personalities of the members of the pursuing band.

The expressions of slave resistance usually conformed to a general pattern, but specific forms were adopted to meet the combination of interregional factors. In Puerto Principe, for example, there were few runaway slave settlements but many vagabond runaway slaves and armed bands of runaways, many of whom were captured by men on horseback. This characteristic was not repeated anywhere else. However, no great distinctions can be made between the level and development of Puerto Principe’s economy and that of the eastern part of the island, a territory in which slave resistance mainly took the form of runaway slave settlements. Geographic conditions had much to do with these differences. In Puerto Principe, large plains used for cattle raising abounded; in the eastern part of the island, unpopulated mountain areas predominated. Therefore, even though all the existing documentation is valid for a general study of the matter, it also recorded the distinguishing regional characteristics of the problem in each territory, since the factors that led to the different forms of resistance were combined in a different way in each of them. Thus, differences between the specific and the general can be established for the phenomenon studied—a key aspect. However, this aspect has not been handled consistently, which has made it impossible to raise the theoretical levels of the studies on this topic in Cuba, since it was precisely these two categories that expressed the diverse connections that existed within the phenomenon and between it and the other components of colonial society.

The runaway slave settlements, as historical events linked to an infinity of changing realities and factors, reflected different levels of connection: first of all, among themselves; second, with the other forms of slave resistance; and, finally, with the other factors in the society that gave rise to them. It is absolutely necessary to understand the oneness of the unique, the specific, and the universal in the phenomenon and also the relative nature of each, depending on the level of the connection, in order to avoid making absurd generalizations—which have been made on occasion and which seem to characterize a social problem that has not changed in the course of years or expressed moments of development and of decline promoted by the internal mechanisms of the phenomenon.

Like any other historical fact, the runaway slave settlements had their distinguishing characteristics and specific qualities that depended on the combination of all their relations with their surroundings; therefore, runaway slave settlements were developed, went through stages, and consequently suffered a decline. They did not exist in the same way throughout all the centuries in which slavery lasted in the colony. Their internal conditions varied over the years, depending on the temporal and spatial connections they had with the phenomena surrounding them.

External factors exerted an influence on the palenques: when the repressive system that was created to oppose them was adapted to suit the regional conditions, the runaway slave settlements were adapted and changed, as well. And the opposite was also true: changes in the system of runaways’ settlements led to adjustments in the repressive system. The cause-and-effect relationship was not only lineal; it involved the universal linking of all phenomena. External factors such as the Haitian revolution also influenced the runaway slave settlements, but that revolution was never their main cause, at least in the case of Cuba.

With runaway slave settlements viewed as a system produced by certain spatial and temporal objective conditions, each such settlement (whether permanent or temporary) expressed a different moment or reality of the system as a whole. Only studies that go beyond the limits of mere description can get to the bottom of the many multifaceted connections that each of them had with the system. However, once uncovered, the causal connections of the establishment of runaway slave settlements allow us to infer the possible extension and extinction of the phenomenon.

The establishment of palenques as a system evolved in accord with its own internal elements, but, as an open system, it was also affected by external factors. When the war of national liberation—which had a very direct effect on the central and eastern parts of the island—broke out in 1868, those settlements were already on the decline. The regime that had given rise to their establishment was in crisis, and the struggle for independence that was aimed against colonial despotism and against the system of slavery itself declared the inhabitants of runaway slave settlements to be free. After ten years of war, both slavery and the colonial regime continued to exist, though clearly weakened. Documents dating from the era contain almost no reports of runaway slave settlements. I return to this polemical point in the final chapters.

When economic development led to the advance of capitalism and capitalism supported the interests of the ruling sectors in Cuba, the regimen of forced labor that had engendered resistance and rebelliousness by the slaves on the island became obsolete. Therefore, the decline of the runaway slave settlements began with the crisis of slavery, and, even though a few of those settlements still existed when the war of 1868 broke out, palenques no longer constituted as serious a problem for the colonial authorities as they had prior to the outbreak of the war.

Earlier Historical Studies

Traditional historiography did not include special studies of runaway slave settlements as a social phenomenon linked to the history of Cuba. Very limited references were made to slave rebellions and to runaway slaves. Prior to 1960, when the triumph of the revolution wrought changes in education, the teaching manuals that circulated in Cuba stated in reference to such matters, There were some sugarcane growers who mistreated the blacks, just as they did the Indians, so many of the blacks fled from the area of one plantation to that of another or hid out in the woods to rob and murder passersby, for which they were hunted down (Aguilar Flores n.d., 174).

This quotation may lead readers to believe that the only reason slaves ran away was because of the harsh punishment meted out to them, and even though a distinction was made between the runaways who wandered from one place to another and those who stayed in the woods, the latter were considered thieves and murderers who hid in the woods for those purposes. It may also be supposed that they were hunted down because of the excesses they committed. I have mentioned this opinion not because it was accurate but because it sums up the feeling of the era and the assessment the people of that time made of the subject treated by this book.

Not all the interpretations were along that line. Renowned researchers who spent years studying various historical matters approached the subject more objectively, though nearly all their studies were rough outlines. Their opinions include Sánchez Guerra’s statement that he considered the El Frijol runaway slave settlement to have been the most important one because it constituted an economic unit (Sánchez Guerra, Guilarte Abreu, and Dranquet Rodriguez 1986, 22). This aspect is analyzed in its corresponding chapter, but for the moment it should be emphasized that, whatever their nature, all the opinions about the forms of slave resistance were limited by the absence of monographic studies that would provide all-encompassing replies to the great questions that existed—and continue to exist, in large measure—concerning this topic. An additional limitation is the position taken by each author—who, in line with his ideology, culture, and prejudices, shows himself to be more or less inclined to identify with the hunted or the hunters.

In particular, before Franco (1973) dusted off a large number of records in the National Archives of Cuba and made the first, most serious attempt to write a history