The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre: Negotiating Freedom in Colonial Cuba, 1670-1780 (review)

El Cobre, home to the Marian sanctuary of La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, patroness of the nation, is emblematic in the Cuban imaginary on and off the island. The fascinating tale in María Elena Díaz's book, however, is of earlier times and a different space in frontier Oriente inhabited by royal slaves and free people of color. In this study of peasants and miners who became slaves of the king when, in 1670, the Spanish Crown confiscated El Cobre copper mines and slaves from a private contractor, Díaz investigates in remarkable detail what it meant to be a cobrero over a hiatus period until 1780, with greater autonomy and freedom, corporate land grants, limited local government, and militia.

Díaz investigates through the imaginative use of written shreds of the story: representations and depositions, baptismal and matrimonial records, and censuses, mainly in Madrid and Seville archives. Thus, we follow correspondence, private and with the Crown, by a member and a favored mulatto slave of the previous contractor's family and a parish priest, narrating incidents found problematic under a royal administration portrayed as rupture, anomie, and misrule. We learn how cobreros became increasingly creolized and developed a sense of their pueblo as patria chica; note male manumission rates unusually higher than those for women; and see royal slaves with personal slaves, female copper miners, and male subsistence farmers mobilizing over livestock provisioning ground in the remapping of cattle estancias and tobacco vegas. We witness major episodes of conflict under Governors Canales and Ximenez, involving exhaustive use of the royal courts, over land, property and inheritance, copper mining, fortifications, and political institutions and practices.

Royal slaves were bounded to corvée labor on fortifications. Yet, negotiations over El Morro in Santiago de Cuba in the decade before and the decade after 1700 saw Father Pérez defend cobreros as men needing to support their families in the face of an unreasonable regime. In turn, cobreros and indios of El Caney opposed Governors Villalobos and Ximenez. Through a similar petition by royal slave Moreno, invoking bonds of pater familias, we follow a dispute in which cobreros fled to the mountains.

In 1687, Moreno recounted that he and two Indians found the Marian effigy at sea, and a small notarization ceremony constituted the Marian shrine. A changed story refers to three blacks of El Cobre, a later one still to one black, one Indian, and one white. The remaking of the Marian tradition from local to regional was linked to the vacuum left by the end of private control, a transition that made conditions favorable for ecclesiastical and lay devotees from outside to help transform the cult. The material reconstruction of the shrine and church was effected with contributions from cobreros and patron donors as the Virgin's fame spread. African Yoruba connotations of Oshun are, we are told, a twentieth-century phenomenon.

In 1780, former heirs took 500 cobreros into private slavery and sold off 800, yet cobreros fought back through flight, violence, and litigation. In 1800, the king signed a royal edict declaring the community a villa and collectively free. The full force of modernity came in the 1800s when mining riches attracted wealthy settlers. Old cobreros were no longer slaves, but newly arrived African slaves and coolies were brought in.

In sum, the author regales us with a magnificent study of microhistory, which at one and the same time grapples with macroconcepts and themes, countering the sugar metanarrative of slavery as social death. The study is a must for all students of Cuban, Caribbean, and Spanish colonial history.