The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre: Negotiating Freedom in Colonial Cuba, 1670-1780, and: A Refuge in Thunder: Candomble and Alternative Spaces of Blackness (review)

What a pleasure to review two such rewarding books, each of which sheds bright and much needed light on black history and culture in Latin America.

María Elena Díaz’s The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre examines a fascinating and little known episode of Cuban and Afro-Latin American history: the century-and-a-half struggle by “royal slaves” in the village of El Cobre to win freedom and land rights for themselves and their families. These slaves were brought to Cuba from Africa in the early 1600s to work in the copper mine that gave the village its name. By 1650 the mine had essentially ceased production and had been abandoned by its concessionaires, the Eguiluz family. Along with the mine, the Eguiluzes also relinquished control over the workforce of some 300 slaves, who promptly seized on the opportunity to re-create themselves and their community as a “reconstituted peasantry,” Díaz argues, employing the concept and terminology originated by Sidney Mintz. Farming village lands, hunting in the surrounding forests, and smelting copper from the piles of discarded tailings left by the mine’s earlier operations, the villagers (known locally as cobreros, copper miners) carved out a life and identity for themselves as slaves living more or less free of any master, fashioning lives largely of their own design.

Thus when the Crown re-asserted direct control over the mine and its village in 1670, and sought to convert the villagers into “royal slaves,” the direct property of the King, trouble was bound to ensue. An initial effort to send the village’s men to Havana, hundreds of miles away, to work on the city’s fortifications, was met by immediate resistance. Villagers fled into the forests and petitioned the Crown to be relieved of such service, arguing that sending the men so far away would leave their wives and children, “whom we have always supported quietly and peacefully” (339), unprotected, hungry, and alone.

The Crown eventually backed down, agreeing to a rotating labor system in which male cobreros worked two weeks out of every eight, and were never sent out of the immediate region. Far from resolving the conflicts between the Crown and its slaves, however, this initial concession marked the beginning of a century-long process of bargaining and negotiation between the two parties, over two basic issues: the terms of the rotating labor draft, and control of agricultural lands surrounding the village. In their dealings with the Crown, the villagers employed a variety of tactics and weapons. They enlisted priests, local elites, and even royal officials in support of their cause; periodically they rebelled and fled into the forest; and they exploited to the maximum the opportunities offered to them by the court system, sending representatives to litigate cases in Havana, at the Audiencia in Santo Domingo, and even at the royal court in Madrid.

By 1780 the Crown had had enough, and returned control of the mine and its slaves to the descendants of the original concessionaires. Rather than attempt to re-open the mine, the new owners decided instead to recoup their investment by rounding up the slaves and selling them. This precipitated the cobreros’ last, titanic effort: again, flight and rebellion, combined with the dispatching in 1784 of a literate villager, Gregorio Cosme Osorio, to Spain to present their case to the king. It took sixteen years (and two monarchs, Charles III having died in 1788 and been succeeded by his son, Charles IV), but ultimately Osorio was successful: in 1800 the Crown conceded collective freedom to the villagers, and formal ownership...