Abstract
El Cobre is a modest mining village of almost legendary character to many Cuban people. It lies in the mountains of the Sierra del Cobre, in the island’s eastern region, in what used to be an important Caribbean frontier area in colonial days. In the imaginary of the Cuban people, El Cobre has long been identified as the abode of a miraculous image of the Virgin of Charity, protectress of this mining community and patroness of the Cuban nation. Yet, as its name suggests (cobre or copper), the village has also been connected with copper mining since its foundation in the sixteenth century. For generations, local families have worked in these copper mines under the aegis of the Spanish crown, private contractors, foreign companies, independent miners, or the socialist state. The centuries long cycles of rise and decline of mining production in El Cobre has constituted an important historical horizon for the development of social and political life in this village. As the crown official in the epigraph suggests, the story of El Cobre before the arrival of modern capitalist mining enterprises in the nineteenth century was quite unusual (not to say fantastic). This study constitutes an attempt to recover that fading memory and to elucidate the alleged fantastic character of that Afro Cuban mining community during an important century of its long colonial history.
The story of El Cobre is very uncertain, not to say fantastic, as it was populated exclusively by Indians [sic] and people of color until recently when the riches of its mines attracted more illustrious settlers and even foreign enterprises.
Gov. Cayetano de Urbina, February 1846
To the present, the greatest amount of copper that is gathered comes from the river that crosses the pueblo, some in grains, other in rock (which is the one that is smelted)…. to this only the women are dedicated and are the ones who search in the deeper pools of the said river.
Don Joseph Palacios de Saldustum, July 31, 1739
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Notes
See María Elena Diaz, The Virgin, the King and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre: Negotiating Freedom in Colonial Cuba, 1670–1780 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
A classic study is that by June Nash, We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian Tin Mines (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979). Other studies include Florencia Mallon, In Defense of Community in Peru’s Central Highlands: Feasant Struggle and Capitalist Transition, 1860–1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984) and Thomas M. Klubock, Contested Communities: Class, Gender, and Politics in Chile’s El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904–1951 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).
There are no studies about how the transition from slavery to free labor took shape in mining communities in Latin America. El Cobre during the nineteenth century constitutes an ideal case study for the examination of that process. For histories of slave-based mining production in Latin America, see particularly Robert C. West, Colonial Placer Mining in Colombia (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1952); William F. Sharp, Slavery on the Spanish Frontier: The Colombian Chocó (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976); A.J.R. Russell-Wood, “Technology and Society: The Impact of Gold-Mining on the Institution of Slavery in Portuguese America,” Journal of Economic History 37 (March 1977): 59–82. For a more social history with an explicit focus on gender, see Kathleen J. Higgins, “Licentious Liberty” in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region: Slavery, Gender, and Social Control in Eighteenth Century Sabará, Minas Gerais (University Park, PN: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999).
Eugenia W. Herbert, Red Gold of Africa: Copper in Pre Colonial History and Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1984) 19–23, 36, 44–45.
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© 2006 Jaclyn J. Gier and Laurie Mercier
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Díaz, M.E. (2006). Mining Women, Royal Slaves: Copper Mining in Colonial Cuba, 1670–1780. In: Gier, J.J., Mercier, L. (eds) Mining Women. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-73399-6_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-73399-6_2
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