We Find an Aboriginal Tool!!
I stayed at the Ariosa for a long time. When I arrived there, the workers asked me, “Hey, where you come from?” And I told them, “I’m a freedman from Purio.” Then they took me to the overseer. He gave me work. He put me to cutting cane. It didn’t seem strange to me; I was already an expert at that. I also cleared the field. That sugar mill was average size. The owner was Ariosa by name, a pure-blood Spaniard. The ariosa was one of the first to be converted to a central site because it had a wide belt that carried the cane to the boiler room. Inside there, it was like all other sugar mills. There were brownnoses and ass kissers for the overseers and masters. (61-62)
--Esteban Montejo
At six we leave the camp, hit the sidewalk of the main street, and walk back to the park to join the dirt path to Adela. The most direct route would have been to continue following the old railroad line to Chiquitico, the old Ariosa ingenio where Esteban worked, but a lunch had been arranged at Adela and that’s where we’re going.
We cross barbed wire fences, walk on grassland, and enter a series of cattle ranches where fences, angry cows, and a relentless mixture of mud and cow shit require us to focus on each step. The cows with calves by their sides eye us suspiciously. We work our way under the fences and around barbed wire gates. Two real cowboys cross our path, riding tall and straight in the saddle, sporting cowboy hats made of straw.
“We heading ok to Adela, compay?” asks Joel. They both point straight ahead like equestrian statues.
Beyond the farmlands we find the rails heading to the Adela mill. The bricks that formed the short bridges guiding the rails over the many arroyos furrowing the land are stamped with the logo of the Sayre and Fisher Brick Company, made in 1891. The Sayre and Fisher Brick Company was the Beatles of brick companies back in the turn-of-the-century day. Sayer and Fisher bricks held up Lady Liberty, forming the base of the iconic monument. The Empire State Building and the Rockefeller Center were constructed with S&F bricks. Those were the days when the octopus of the United States economic empire stretched its tentacles effortlessly from New York to Cuba, marking the early years of the U.S. control of the Cuban economy. I walk over the rails cautiously; careful not to fall into the bricked culvert underneath, balancing myself with my walking sticks. The drop may have only been about 20 feet, but I was not interested in putting my land-and-roll technique to the test.
After crossing one of these spans, we see a farmer approaching. He looks middle aged, with a weather- worn face. Joel greets him with a handshake.
“You coming to the event next week?” asks the guajiro. “I have an art exhibition in Sagua.”
“I’ll try. Depends on the transporte,” Joel responds.
As we continue our way, Joel explains: “He’s an artist. Pretty good, too. I know him from the UNEAC.”
We continue through a patchwork of cattle ranches enclosed by barbed wire. While making our way around the edge of a flat, green field, Alexis holds his arms wide to stop us all and says urgently, “Look. Wait.”
He look at the ground, staring hard at what looks to me like the exposed top of a shiny oblong rock, about ten inches long, all but completely buried in the hard dirt. He digs around the rock with a stick.
“This is something,” he says with excitement in his voice. “An aboriginal mortar! Look.”
He gently pulls it out of the dirt as if it is a wounded animal.
“When they’re shiny like this,” he explains, “they are ceremonial. To crush seeds or nuts to eat, they used whatever they could, and it wouldn’t be taken care of like this. It wouldn’t be polished like this.” He is smiling. “If it’s what I think it is, this is the only one ever found in the province.”
He gently wraps it in a cloth, as if the solid piece of stone that has survived hundreds of years of abuse would suddenly turn to sand in his hands. He places it gently in one pocket of his explorer’s vest.
Conversations about the aboriginal presence in this area lighten the pack for the next few kilometers. Alexis talks of the abundant evidence of settlements throughout the region but recognizes that the Spaniards wiped them out, with germs or steel, early in the game. I tell him that the historian of Baracoa, Armando Hartmann, holds a different opinion. Dr. Hartmann has developed quite an international profile promoting the idea that a substantial number of native Cubans avoided extinction or extermination by fleeing into the eastern mountains and eventually blending with cimarrones and ex-slaves. Alexis listens, says maybe, but sounds unconvinced.
When I met Hartmann in 2011 during my walk from Baracoa to Bayamo, he took me to meet some of his “specimens;” Cubans who had all the features of native Americans plus a bit of darker pigmentation after years of relationships with Afro-Cubans.
“There are entire villages in the mountains near Guantanamo that look like this man,” he said, referring to an aboriginal looking fellow we met on the street outside his house in Baracoa. “We still have an aboriginal population in Cuba. A mestizo population.”
He dismissed the possibility that his aboriginals were descendants of a later migration of Native Americans from the Florida and Yucatan peninsulas. Florida Indians sporadically were transported to Cuba from the 16th to the 19th centuries as laborers and this forced migration serves as the usual explanation for the presence of aboriginal mestizos in Cuba.
“They have it wrong,” he insisted. “Those never made it to this end of the island. I’ll prove it, you’ll see.” He has toured the States on various occasions speaking to groups at Harvard, the Smithsonian and other institutions sharing his views.
Perhaps the best representation of the view that the Tainos are still with us is the book Panchito, Cacique de Montaña: Testimonio guajiro-taino de Francisco Ramires Rojas. Panchito, as the peasant-taino is called, relates his life in the mountains of eastern Cuba and shares oral histories which convince the author that, in the words of Mark Twain, the news of the Tainos extinction are greatly exaggerated. (See Jose Barreiro, Panchito, Cacique de Montaña: Testimonio guajiro-taino de Francisco Ramirez Rojas. Editorial Campana. 2017.)
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