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63 PART II Branches The Negotiations of Life on the Cafetal T he rhythms of life on the cafetales, like all rhythms, had points of emphasis and periods of rest, and like the music that arose out of the cultural ingredients brought together during the period of the plantation boom, some activities were directed and some were created spontaneously by the “players.” Gaps in directed activities or slippage in the structure created by slaveholders opened up space for slaves to exercise agency. It was in these day-to-day moments that men and women in bondage shaped time, space, and conceptions of identifications according to their own designs. It was during these “free” times that slaves grew their own food, made goods, engaged in commerce, and practiced cultural forms such as dance, music, and religion. It was in the physical spaces of the plantation that the enslaved began to retake possession of themselves by asserting new personal and group identifications. These representations found expression in and through slave actions against their oppressors. The primary reason plantation owners held slaves was to exploit their labor. It was the overriding aspect of the slave system as well as the chief element in ordering the daily lives of enslaved workers on individual plantations. It was through the labor of slaves that the wealth of planters, the colony of Cuba, and the Spanish empire were created. Planters and officials understood this relationship and therefore managed the larger complex in ways to elicit compliant behavior from those they sought to keep in subjugation. Fully utilizing the labor of slaves meant keeping them busy, fully occupying their time to minimize the opportunities slaves had to act in their own interests. In other words, an important aspect of managing slaves was to keep them pacified, which owners tried to do by filling slaves’ time with as much work as possible. Slaveholders were able to accomplish many of their goals, as evidenced by the extensive system of plantations established in Cuba. Nevertheless, their control was not absolute, as they found it impractical or inefficient to utilize or manage every minute of the time of their slaves. Slaves, for their part, quickly seized on whatever opportuni- 64 Shade-Grown Slavery ties were available. They filled up any time left to them with their own activities, creating a counterpoint to the owner-imposed rhythms of the cafetal. Growing food, raising animals, and other activities contributed to the lives of slaves materially and cognitively. The production of food and other goods enabled slaves to contribute to their own well-being and created a way into the larger system of commerce. This benefited them by improving their diets and their economy, which in turn provided hope and a way of resistance against their enslavement. It is evident that work played a significant role in how slaves experienced life on the farm. The spaces in which activities occurred also played an important part on the cafetales. Slaveholders sought to exercise control over space in much the same way they dominated time on plantations. Masters and their agents defined where activities were conducted through a classification process that delineated the uses of both buildings and open areas. The positioning of structures and the development and cultivation of selected areas on the canvas of the farm enabled planters to shape the relationships between types of buildings and types of land, as well as between land and buildings. The entire farm was a built environment constructed through the imagined design of the owner. A product of this process was the somewhat slippery or contested delineation between areas that were well-controlled by slaveholders and those places where slaves exercised some control over their own time and activities. These areas included both housing or living spaces and the fields and wooded lots of the farm. Slaveholders directed the configuration and style of the places of habitation, but slaves inhabited them. Bohíos and barracones (barracks) dotted the landscape and suggested the ordering that owners intended—but within the walls and behind the doors, slaves lived their lives. Bohíos and open barracones contributed to the lived experiences of slaves by both their arrangement or style, and by their persistence vis-à-vis barracones de patio (enclosed barracks), which predominated on ingenios much earlier. To be sure, slaves did not control their own activities and spaces in any sort of absolute way. Instead, their actions and these places were sites of contestation in which slaves fought with their rulers...

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