/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/CULTURE-CUBA: French Ruins May Be Named World Heritage Site

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Apr 4 2000 (IPS) - The ruins of 19th century French-owned coffee plantations in eastern Cuba, vestiges of a nearly forgotten current of immigration, could be named a world heritage site.

Crumbling fragments of mansions, the remains of an aqueduct and gravestones peer through lush tropical growth, under which long abandoned gardens are barely discernible. The network of cobblestone roads built by the local French community to take the coffee to port are long since grown over.

The proposal presented to Cuba by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) is a result of the salvage and conservation efforts carried out since nearly 100 long-abandoned coffee estates in the mountains surrounding the eastern cities of Santiago and Guantanamo were declared national monuments in 1991.

“Despite the passage of time, natural phenomena and human action, structures of stately dwellings were identified, and the findings confirm the extent to which agribusiness had developed in the area,” said a report published by Cuba’s state-monopolised press.

Among the ruins were identified the crumbling, overgrown infrastructure and mansion of the La Isabelica coffee plantation, near Santiago, which was owned by French colonialist Prudencio Casamayor.

Cuban demographer and historian Juan Pérez de la Riva wrote in his book “El Barracón”, published in 1975, that although there was no reliable evidence, the origin of Casamayor’s fortune undoubtedly lay in privateering activities waged with government permission against pirate or enemy ships, a common source of wealth among French immigrants during the 1800s.

After taking refuge in eastern Cuba in 1797, Casamayor moved to Santiago in 1800, opened the city’s main trading store, and made a killing by purchasing land from the Royal Excheqeur to resell to his fellow countrymen in small lots.

Pérez de la Riva told how Casamayor became the richest resident of Santiago in his day.

“Besides parcelling out land, engineering roads and acting as official interpreter for the government, he seems to have been the natural representative of the French colony,” as well as “the biggest promoter of capitalism based on plantations and slave labour,” wrote the historian.

A 1968 field study by Pérez de la Riva and demographer Blanca Morejón is one of the few bibliographical references available on French immigration into eastern Cuba.

The shackles “found in the ruins destroy the idyllic image of French colonisation that historians have painted up to now,” the authors wrote.

The first French colonialists and Haitian-born creoles to arrive in Cuba were fleeing the slave rebellion that broke out in Haiti on Aug 14, 1791. They continued to arrive until 1803.

Among them were military officers retreating in defeat, people who had found themselves unemployed, bankrupt merchants, craftspeople and society’s outcasts, as well as more than 100 former plantation administrators or owners who began planting coffee trees in Cuba’s eastern mountains.

According to the accounts of historians, some of the new arrivals gave classes in French, history, geography, embroidery or cuisine. But most set up shops, theatres and brothels – or got involved in privateering or piracy.

Piracy against British or French vessels provided many colonists from Haiti with “the funds needed to develop and run their new coffee plantations in Cuba,” said Pérez de la Riva.

Coffee plantations expanded with unusual speed around Santiago. The number of coffee shrubs grew from an estimated 100,000 in 1803 to four million just four years later, when there were a total of 191 plantations, on which 1,650 slaves worked, besides the paid staff.

But according to Pérez de la Riva, the French plantations were destined to disappear.

The lay of the land, climate and soil were deceptively similar to those of Haiti, which led the colonialists to believe that they would simply have to transfer the same techniques, involving the most advanced technology at that time, that they had used back in Haiti.

But Cuban soil differed from that of Haiti much more than the colonialists realized, and their inability to adapt their techniques to local conditions was the main cause of the decline of the French plantations after just a few decades.

Furthermore, wrote Pérez de la Riva, “the very structure of the local French community condemned it to disappear, once the flow of immigration ceased.” He pointed out that men outnumbered women by three to one in 1808 and by 5.2 to one in 1868.

By 1899, at the end of Cuba’s wars of independence against Spain, only 245 French people remained in the eastern part of the island, 52 of them in the city of Santiago.

Last decade a museum was set up at the La Isabelica plantation, as one of the first efforts to salvage the memories of the era of the French coffee estates from oblivion. But few Cubans visit the ruins.

In the past few years, UNESCO has added Old Havana, the city of Trinidad, the Castillo del Morro in Santiago and the Valle de Viñales in western Cuba to its list of world heritage sites.