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90 Chapter 4 Under Cover of Night Religious Practices The African soil, from which they were torn, still clings to them, neither washed off in the font of baptism or the stream of knowledge. —Robert Jameson Religious practices were central to the lives of the enslaved all across the island. As the previous chapters have shown, slaves on coffee plantations lived within the context of a set of conditions that offered some limited possibilities for personal and collective expression. On the coffee plantations of western Cuba, the rapid expansion of the enslaved population, the geographic arrangement of the district in which the cafetales were situated, and the structural organization of the farms enabled Africans and their descendants sufficient control over their time and space to engage in practicing many of the forms of their belief systems. Slaves engaged in religious activities in a variety of ways. Religious actions and objects were often reported in connection with uprisings, for example. Other religiously significant practices were embedded in activities such as music and dance and cooking. This chapter explores these types of expressions among Africans and their descendants on the coffee plantations of western Cuba, connecting African origins to Cuban experience. Religious practices within a population serve many functions—creating cultural cohesion, structuring knowledge systems, and ordering the social system, just to name a few. Both the enslaved and their enslavers were religious practitioners , but this system functioned in ways that are not easily explained. As Fred Solt et al. have recently argued, religiosity and economic inequality correlate closely throughout the world. This also crosses class lines, as both the upper and lower classes are more religious in societies where there is greater disparity of wealth.1 But in the work of Solt et al., the religion practiced is typically shared; in other words, the upper and lower classes are practicing the same religion. This makes it easier for those in power to use a commonly understood religious discourse to maintain the status quo. This was not the case in Cuba. The slave-­ holding class and the enslaved were not typically practicing or adhering to the same religious systems. This resulted in a gap in knowledge and limited the effectiveness of discursive measures of control and persuasion. This raises questions about conversion and also about what sort of hegemonic discourse or Under Cover of Night 91 power the master class was mobilizing, the ways it could institute in order to dominate the population, and how effectively Africans could resist. The environment of the cafetal allowed dotación members to reconstitute parts of their social worlds, effectively demonstrating that they could resist complete subjugation. The ongoing religious practices of slaves attest to their ability to resist and re­ establish their own social structure. This chapter will show that collective actions were intimately intertwined with cultural connections. Slaves needed networks to survive and it was through the practice of cultural activities that they created and nurtured these types of contacts. Coffee plantations provided an essential environment for cultural continuities as well as reconfigurations and propagation. Engaging in cultural practices in the context of a plantation economy or complex was of necessity an exercise of pragmatic accommodation and measured resistance. The actions the enslaved took were always in tension between these two poles. For Africans to maintain some of their relative autonomy, they had to navigate successfully the master/slave relationship. The slaves of the cafetales of western Cuba not only found ways to subvert the construction of time and space designed by slaveholders, they also found ways to challenge the cosmological world that planters and their agents sought to impose. The spaces that slaves occupied—their housing, whether bohío or barracón—were sites of contestation between members of the ruling class and those they sought to dominate. Slaveholders controlled where slaves lived, but the enslaved shaped how they inhabited those spaces. Coerced laborers inhabited their housing in ways that served their own interests and challenged the exercise and instrumentality of power. They did not merely occupy space as laborers on demand; they rebuilt their lives within the walls of their quarters. Through their actions, in fields, in open areas of the farm, and by accessing intra-plantation networks, slaves worked to establish their own axis of power. By conducting religious practices behind closed doors, cooking their traditional dishes, drumming , dancing, and keeping their indigenous languages alive, enslaved workers fought for their collective and individual sense of self. It was through the exercise...

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