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

The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre: Negotiating Freedom in Colonial Cuba, 1670-1780. By Maria Elena Diaz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. xviii + 440 pp.).

El Cobre, in Eastern Cuba, is now known primarily as home to one of Cuba's foremost nationalist symbols: the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre, widely interpreted in contemporary Cuba as an incarnation of the Yoruba deity Oshun. According to legend, three fishermen--one black, one white, and one Indian--found the Virgin's effigy, still on display at the shrine in El Cobre, floating in the Bay of Nipe, in the Caribbean sea.

This much many readers will already know. More likely to be news is that earlier versions of the story, produced in El Cobre, claim that the Virgin was found by two Indian and one black fishermen. Juan Moreno, the black man, was in common with most El Cobre residents a "royal" slave, belonging to the Spanish crown rather than to a private owner. As the copper mine from which the village took its name declined, the state in 1670 ousted the private contractor who had previously managed it, and took over ownership of his 271 slaves. By the 1770s the royal slave population had more than trebled, without imports.

These royal slaves, who lived for more than a century in a community without overseers, masters or managers, form the subject of this important book. Their determined defense of their unusual position allowed them to marry, to transmit property including a few slaves of their own, to form their own cabildo (local government), and even to send representatives to argue (unsuccessfully) for their full freedom before the Supreme Royal Council of the Indies in Madrid. Although they were never able to completely avoid forced labor for the crown, the cobreros' work in state fortifications and hospitals constituted, Diaz argues, "a 'slave breach' in an already reconstituted peasant community" rather than a "peasant breach" in a system of slavery (p. 258). The cobreros' lives had more in common with those of indigenous people subject to tributary forms of labor extraction in other parts of Spanish America than with the lives of plantation slaves.

Diaz's analysis of El Cobre's demography, the community's property holdings, and its labor patterns would in itself be a major contribution to Cuban colonial history. Her real interest, however, is the cobreros' self-invention as a creole community. Her reconstruction, threaded throughout the book, of the cobreros' use of narratives of their past to claim for themselves a place in the Spanish colonial world is imaginative and persuasive. Diaz reads the documents produced in the course of the frequent disputes between the cobreros and ecclesiastical and state officials with sensitivity to the complexity, multivocality, and nuance of such texts, and without obscuring tensions and conflicts within the community. In this, her work is a model for scholars attempting to understand the political discourse and social imaginaries of subaltern communities of all kinds.

Modifying Benedict Anderson's argument about imagined communities, and challenging some current assumptions about the African orientation of New World black identities, Diaz effectively argues for the cobreros' attachment to a patria chica, a local community as much imagined as any national identity. Despite El Cobre's later importance for the formation of Cuban national identity, Diaz finds no evidence of incipient nationalism. Rather, she maintains that in the eighteenth century, attachment to the Virgin of Charity helped to ground a strongly locally rooted sense of self and community.

Throughout, Diaz pays careful attention to the gendering of this community's experience and self-understanding. She attends both to the distinct experiences of men and women, and to the grounding of the cobreros' claim-making in gendered ideologies. In particular, she stresses the importance to cobrero men of an ideology of pater familia. Concluding that "freedom and slavery were imagined as differently gendered statuses or identities" (p. 168), Diaz shows that men based claims for reduction of the stare's forced labor requirements on their need to work their own land in order to support their wives and children. In so doing they laid claim to a specifically masculine free status, based on having dependents, that was inaccessible to women.

Diaz's work is part of a trend away from the traditional focus on the plantation towards an emphasis on the ambiguities within enslaved status for particular groups of bonded people. Like other recent scholars, Diaz understands slavery and freedom as points on a continuum--or, better, within a multi-dimensional space rather than the two-dimensionality implied by "continuum"--rather than categories standing in Opposition to one another. As she notes, the history of communities like El Cobre requires us to open up "historiographical genres ... to better grasp the mercurial character, paradoxical aspects, and overlapping dimensions of social experience" (p. 315). This point is well taken. But in calling into question the category "slavery," studies like The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre raise further questions. It would be easier to make sense of the cobreros' exceptional position if Diaz had attended more to the intersection of local and global forces in the context of which they negotiated their ambiguous status. Clearly the cobreros' creative resistance at least partly explains their ability to establish and maintain their position as royal slaves. But Cuba's relatively marginal position in the eighteenth-century Atlantic economy must also have been important. Did this marginality mean, for instance, that the colonial state had few resources with which to coerce the cobreros, that there was relatively low demand for slaves on private plantations, and thus that the costs of subduing the community outweighed the possible political, social, and disciplinary advantages for the colonial elite? Could such a community have established itself during Cuba's nineteenth-century sugar boom? If Diaz had pursued such questions alongside her local study, this work might have overcome some of the tensions between a historiography attentive to discourse, imagination, desire, and representation on the one hand, and world-scale, "big picture," or materialist history on the other. For this reviewer it is disappo inting that she did not. However, this criticism should not detract from what is, by any measure, an exceptionally stimulating, rich and exciting book.