¡Caminando!
¿Estas loco?
The pack is too heavy. I am willing to bet that Esteban, the run-away slave whose fugitive life I am tracing, did not carry a pack full of unnecessary shit. All this electronic crap brought along in the hopes of documenting this “wild project,” as Miguel Barnet described it. It all made sense on the planning table. But now, on the first day of the two week walk, climbing up this slight, normally inconsequential hill towards Guayabo Cuartel, the tiny GoPro, the batteries for the two cameras, the charging equipment, all had grown fat and made me wonder what I was thinking when I packed them.
Twenty kilometers into the first day the GoPro memory is already filled with views of the endless cane fields and distant sugar mill smokestacks rising like tombstones against the horizon. This is Cuba in 2016, yes, but a great deal of what I will be seeing is Cuba from the 1890s too. This is the terrain where Esteban Montejo ran his flight from slave chains more than one hundred years ago. A beautiful, intense, paradoxical backdrop full of scarcity and plenty.
The hill leading up to Guayabo Cuartel is the first of the day and most likely the last. The route I developed lacks much elevation. The highest point is probably Manicaragua, at the foot of the Escanbray Mountains, at a mere five-hundred feet above sea level.
We were walking Cuba por dentro, through its insides, looking for the ghost of Esteban Montejo, the last run-away slave alive in Cuba in the 1960s. The experiences of cimarrones, runaway slaves, are a foundation stone of Cuban history and identity. I am at the start of the three hundred plus kilometer path I designed to trace part of the life of Esteban Montejo, as a runaway slave, as a worker, as a citizen of an emerging multicultural nation.
***
During the second half of the nineteenth century, Cuba, one of the last countries still under the yoke of the diminished Spanish empire, decided to make a run for it. A run for freedom. It tried first in 1868 and moved the ball along but after ten years of death and destruction trying to break the colonial bond, the effort fell short. The Spaniards resumed control in 1878 and promised many reforms. Empires are inept at adjusting their practices for the wellbeing of their colonies, so nothing came of the promises.
Cuba tried again in August of 1879 but this time they brought a knife to a gun fight and the knife was not very sharp. Maybe if the uprising, known as the “Guerra Chica,” (the Little War) had not lacked leadership, weapons, ammunition, and allies of any kind, maybe the outcome would have been different. As it was, the attempted escape from the yoke of colonialism lasted thirteen months, until September of 1880.
Finally, in 1895, leaders, weapons, and the national will aligned and the escape to freedom succeeded. In 1898 Cuba broke free from Spain. It was a costly and ultimately unsatisfying victory. Over 300,000 Cubans perished, most of them civilians in concentration camps, inaugurated by the Spaniards to control the population. The United States, who saw the war as an opportunity to put the last nails in the coffin of the Spanish Empire, jumped into the fray three months from the end of the war. They imposed a military government on Cuba which lasted until 1902 and shaped (many would say misshaped) the history of Cuba to the present day.
Eight years before the start of the first attempt at throwing off the dying carcass of the Spanish empire, in 1860, a black slave was born in a mill town on the banks of the Undoso River in central Cuba. His name was Esteban Montejo. He grew up not a Cuban, not an African, not a man, but a slave. Too valuable as an animal to kill outright but not valuable enough to be considered a simple human being. He too longed for freedom. He too attempted unsuccessfully to run from the master’s yoke. And he too succeeded eventually and entered the ambivalent state of “freedom” suffered by all cimarrones. He became a black man, runaway private property, hunted by dogs and bounty hunters through the Cuban countryside.
In 1963, a young, blonde, and irrepressible Miguel Barnet, recently graduated in Anthropology from the Universidad de la Habana, worked at the Academia de Ciencias, the Cuban equivalent of the National Science Foundation in the U.S. Miguel was working with a team of researchers exploring the slave quarters of ancient Cuban sugar mills; los barracones azucareros.
“We would go down into barracones around Matanzas, I remember. Looking at the ventilation; at the inhuman conditions. The research was very depressing. To see, to feel how people were treated, how slaves lived, was very depressing.”
One day heading home on the bus, Miguel read in the newspaper a series of interviews which changed his life forever. The special coverage formed part of a series highlighting Cuban men and women who had celebrated their 100thbirthdays. One of these stories jumped out at him. It was the story of a man by the name of Esteban Montejo, a man whose life story immediately struck Miguel as deserving of great attention. Not only had Esteban been a slave back in the day when that was the lot for most black men in Cuba, but, moreover, he had been a cimarrón, a runaway slave. A slave who decided to leave the cruel but predictable conditions of the slave-driven sugar plantation and take the chance of surviving as a free yet always-hunted man without a place to call home.
“This man’s picture looked back at me from the pages of the paper,” Miguel remembered. “I was transfixed. What a marvelous individual! I said to myself. I could not get him out of my head. So, I went to visit him.”
A few days after reading the story, Miguel took a bus to La Casa de los Veteranos, a home for elderly veterans of the Cuban armed forces. The first meeting was awkward. Neither man felt comfortable with the other, but each sensed a vague purpose fueled by curiosity. Miguel tried to explain the circumstances leading to this fateful encounter. Esteban listened and politely answered questions. The first meeting led to a second and the second to a third. The interviews continued, focusing on Esteban’s experiences. How did you live? What did you think? Who did you meet? Miguel would ask and then fact checked the answers with experts who might know something of the period and of the regions where Esteban roamed.
The days of discussion stretched into months and then into years. For over two years Miguel and Esteban met at the Casa de los Veteranos, sometimes under a palm tree that still stands on its grounds. Miguel recorded all the interviews on an unwieldy tape recorder of industrial dimensions borrowed from his day job at the Academia de Ciencias and which he lugged daily to and from the Casas de los Veteranos on the bus.
“He was a very humble man. He did not think that his life was that special. Finally, one day I said to him, Esteban, there are thousands like you, people who have not had a voice to express the value of their lives. I want to be that voice for you. He loosened up after that.”
He did not expect the memory of a one hundred and three-year-old man to be flawless but the impassioned and detailed conversations convinced Miguel that this was a story worth telling. That this was a life worth remembering. Here was a man, Miguel would write in the first edition of the book, who was “an authentic actor in the process of history in Cuba.” This was a man whose life story was like a living metaphor which captured the development of Cuban identity and the interminable struggle for freedom, whatever that means.
At the time of its publication in 1966, Biografía de un Cimarrón was as much a political statement as an anthropological or literary one. In literary circles, the work set the standard for the testimonial novel, a genre which empowers those whose stories had traditionally been told by others. As a work of ethnographic anthropology, the life of Esteban made clear how slavery and freedom from slavery presented equally challenging threats to survival for a Cuban of African descent. Politically, the book provided a narrative, in the voice of the previously powerless. Esteban’s was the voice of the “one revolution” that, according to Fidel Castro, started in 1868, with the Ten Year’s War and culminated in 1959 with the Triumph of the Revolution. Biografía de un Cimarrón is the most published Cuban book of all times. As Graham Greene said, “There has been no book like this before and it is unlikely that there ever will be another like it.”
I reread Biografia in 2015 in April of 2015 to find a way to use it in my sociology course The Individual in Society. I noted that 2016 would mark the fiftieth anniversary of its publication, I drafted a letter to Miguel, who I had known for several years, and proposed to establish a walking trail commemorating the life of Esteban Montejo and the publication of the book.
“There will be many celebrations of your work in the coming year, I’m sure,” I wrote to Miguel. “But there is one thing that I can do that no one that I know can do. I can make your work and the life of Esteban a lived experience that might introduce others to your work and to his life. I can establish a walking path, based on Esteban’s recollections in Biografía, that will take a walker, or a biker, or a casual tourist, through the geography where Esteban worked, escaped, survived as a cimarrón, and fought for Cuban independence. I can establish El Camino del Cimarrón as a historic trail.”
I knew that if Miguel liked the idea, he would help me make it happen. If I did not receive his support, there was no chance, regardless of how many contacts I might mobilize, to make it a reality. I sent the letter to Miguel’s personal e-mail and I waited.
His silence stretched for many days. Miguel disliked emails on principle, so it did not surprise me that no answer came immediately. I did not have a trip planned to Havana, so I did the next logical thing: I contacted a good friend who also knew Miguel and who was heading to Havana that week. We met and I presented my vision to her: design a trek tracing the ramblings of Cuba’s last surviving runaway slave, tying the birth of the Cuban nation with its rebirth after the Revolution. She volunteered to take my proposal to Miguel herself. I knew that she would be the perfect messenger to approach Miguel.
Days later, on May 28, 2015, while my friend was still in Havana, I received an e-mail from Miguel. Here is the translation:
Dear friend Grenier:
Silvia, our mutual friend, gave me the project that will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the publication of my book Biography of a Runaway Slave. The Walk that will trace the history lived by Esteban Montejo seems to me extraordinarily original. I think it has a particular edge to it and it is certainly worth documenting the itinerary of places mentioned in the book. Needless to say, both UNEAC and the Fernando Ortiz Foundation can sponsor since it fits into our cultural and academic profile of activities. The Walk goes beyond the themes of the book and will be, as you say, a tribute to the history of Cuban culture looked at from the lenses of slavery. It is an ambitious project and will require the contribution of other institutions, but the impossible is possible in these cases.
I thank you for the initiative and modestly hope to contribute to it.
Warm embraces,
Miguel Barnet
***
I began the laborious process of tracing the route. I had to find his birthplace, his workplaces, the cave he inhabited and the towns meaningful to him. The names of sugar mills, traditionally associated with the family of the original owners, changed in the 1980s to names of patriots of revolutionary struggles, of the 19th or 20th centuries, or events marking important moments in Cuban history. A bit of web digging provided me with the traditional names of the mills and their new revolutionary names. I pinned the history in Esteban’s narrative to the contemporary map of Cuba and slowly a path emerged.
One problem remained and it seemed intractable. No one seemed to know where to find the caves remembered so vividly by Esteban. Miguel did not know. None of the historians I probed knew. The text clearly stated that the cave had a name, “Guajaban” and that it was near the town of Remedios. That name did not sound familiar to anyone. Not my contacts at the Ministry of Culture, or at the University of Havana, or at UNEAC offices in Cienfuegos helping me locate points of interest in the province.
The route took shape without locating the caves. It did not seem right. Cimarrones throughout Cuba sheltered in caves. For me this symbolized Cuba itself, the island, protecting its children from the colonizers. I needed to find that cave but I had done all I could do from this side of the Florida Straits.
The proposed Camino de Cimmaron would be a three-hundred-kilometer walk, roughly, starting in Sagua la Grande, heading east towards Remedios before cutting south towards Zulueta and Manicaragua, then west towards Mal Tiempo, Lajas, and then south to Cienfuegos.
At each town a local resident, familiar with the terrain would accompany, or give me directions, to the next town “por dentro,” through dirt roads and trails, avoiding asphalt as much as possible.
And all continued to move along as planned, except for two meaningful adjustments brought about by the impetuous desire of President Obama to change the course of history. Without checking with me, Obama scheduled his historic trip to Cuba on the week that I would be in the middle of my walk. The trip was announced on February 18th, 2016 and on that day every Cuban on the island changed his or her job description to “Obama Presidential Visit Organizer.” Miguel suggested that I postpone the walk until after Obama’s visit. I had no choice.
The delay was providencial. Two weeks before the re-scheduled start of the walk near the end of March, I received a scanned article from the vice director of the Villa Clara branch of the Ministerio de Cultura. The scan was an article published in the magazine Bohemia in 1988. There, on its front page was a picture of a cave. The title of the article was “La Casa del Cimarron” (The House of the Cimarron). This was the cave where Esteban Montejo spent a year and a half of his fugitive life. And it was located precisely where I thought it should be located; east of Remedios near the town of Guajabana.
All the pieces were in place.
The Camino del Cimarron was waiting to be walked.
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