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69 Chapter 3 Space Is the Place Intentions and Subversion of Design In the piazza of the house, on the basement story, were forty negroes, sorting coffee into three parcels—good, inferior, and bad. They were fine looking negroes, lusty and muscular, and of contented countenances. Most of them were singing in a low tone; one leading, and several responding in chorus, as in the water-song of Carolina. —Abiel Abbot S laves experienced life on cafetales in multiple ways that were shaped by those who held them in bondage, by the physical environment—both the built and the “natural”—and by their own actions. Slavery was first and foremost a system of labor exploitation. And it was slaves who built the hundreds of cafetales that covered the land of western Cuba. They toiled to transform the region from its beginnings as virgin land into the fertile and profitable showplace it would become. With coffee farms, this would not be an overnight project, but one that required planning and patience. As we have seen, it was a four- to five-year commitment of capital from the time a planter acquired land and slaves, and axes were laid to trees, until a cafetal began to produce a marketable crop of coffee. The work of establishing a new farm, as described in Chapter 2, was extensive and rigorous, but once the initial list of tasks was completed —the fields cleared, cleaned, and planted, other seedings of fruit trees and vegetables undertaken, and basic infrastructure built—the day-to-day routine of cafetal life began in earnest. While it was the slaves who built the physical structures of the plantation, it was planters who actively defined the spaces of the plantation and worked to erect the cognitive structure that was an important part of shaping the lives of their slaves. As productive cafetales emerged, owners expanded their slaveholdings, reshaping plantation demography, and instituted management practices that governed the time and labor of their dotaciones. The presence of women in increasing numbers on coffee plantations underscores the nature of work on these farms as well as how coffee labor was understood by slaveholders. Many tasks associated with the commercial production of coffee beans for export required stamina and dexterity rather than sheer physical strength. Women and even children often excelled at harvesting or picking the fruit of the coffee bush, cleaning the harvest, and sorting the dried beans. These three aspects of the production process, along with weeding, were the 70 Shade-Grown Slavery chores that required the greatest number of workers. It is evident from the shifting demography of the region that planters realized that women could be valuable contributors to a productive workforce and that they did not need to rely on a predominantly male dotaciones. This realization was reflected in the steadily expanding ranks of female slaves on cafetales. The daily regime on coffee farms created a distinct rhythm to life. The bell that marked the beginning of each day, the review and assignment of work by the overseer, working together in groups large and small—all these created patterns of habit among the subaltern. Masters and their agents had developed an understanding of the demands of the plants their slaves were cultivating. Slaveholders and the needs of the crop, as they were understood, together shaped the day-today routine of workers in both intended and unintended ways.1 The types of jobs managers scheduled to be performed located coffee labor between the poles of the task and gang labor continuum.2 Some of the toil on coffee farms was exe­ cuted using gang labor while other work allowed for the use of the task system. This marked another divergence from the more highly structured environment found on sugar cane farms, which featured an almost exclusive use of gang labor . Daily work was in large part formulated and regulated through its interaction with the yearly cycle of tasks that constituted the productive organization of coffee plantation agriculture. It is evident that work played a significant role in how slaves experienced life on the farm. The spaces in which activities occurred also was important in the lives of those bonded on cafetales. Masters instructed their workers in the creation of highly structured and fully articulated areas of cultivation and production. In addition, owners delineated the zones for slave habitation and self-­ directed work. Most cafetaleros allowed their workers to continue to live in bohíos or modified types of barracones throughout the...

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