1 Introduction
From the perspective of heritage studies, managing rural industrial heritage fosters the revaluation of cultural assets and archaeological landscapes, generating sustainable local development models. In Cuba, examples of this are very scarce, though the creation of ecomuseums could promote endogenous development through the design and implementation of sociocultural projects rooted in the country’s various rural industrial landscapes, which are fundamentally linked to nineteenth-century sugar and coffee production. This would constitute a valid strategy for old mills and coffee plantations that are in an advanced state of deterioration, a reality that is unfortunately confronted at countless sites in Cuba.
A correct valuation of this historical-archaeological heritage would yield public benefits: not only economic benefits but also social ones, drawing from the meaning and importance of this heritage while also allowing for its protection and preservation for future generations. Researcher Rolando Bustos has pointed out that he prefers to use the term “patrimonializing” to refer to the perspective of builders of patrimony rather than custodians of it, because “(…) although patrimony has the idea of the parents’ legacy, of an authorization by the past, actually patrimonialization implies an action, that is to say, a project that is oriented towards the future” (2004, p. 19).
The implementation of this process does not necessarily imply the implementation of museum procedures to achieve the safeguarding of objects, sites, or regions. In western Cuba, the patrimonialization of old coffee farms has made it possible to strengthen the link between archaeology and ecomuseum, giving the community the option of getting to know its past better and living with the material evidence of it.
The environmental and historical specificities of the Las Terrazas community (Figure 9.1), located to the east of the Sierra del Rosario, Artemisa Province, ultimately spurred the inauguration (in May 2010) of the Las Terrazas Ecomuseum,
Location of Las Terrazas town as part of the Sierra del Rosario Biosphere Reserve, Artemisa Province
CREATED BY THE AUTHOR
Thanks to this initiative and to the interest of the management of the local tourist complex, in 2011, archaeological investigations began at the old San Pedro coffee plantation, one of the sites belonging to said ecomuseum, under the notion that the industrial landscapes and movable and immovable evidence that need to be understood and assumed as part of the past and present. This implies that historians and archaeologists intervene as “translators” and reveal, through the study of documents and items, the history of the sites and of the men who inhabited them.
Industrial heritage has very different characteristics from other types of heritage assets. The most significant difference is that its importance does not lie in its uniqueness, but on the contrary, in its impact on a certain place.
The generalized concept of heritage arose in the nineteenth century with the Industrial Revolution, which presupposed a radical change in the way of producing material goods in some societies, moving from agrarian to industrial. The process began in England, with social changes that brought about the use of new techniques, energy sources, and forms of labor organization, which caused an unusual growth in the production of consumer goods. The daily life of different social sectors was drastically modified with the development of capitalism and the new relations of production that the system introduced. Taking these contrasts into account, today we can consider industrial heritage worthy of this category due to its specific values—whether an old plantation or a fifty-year-old factory.
This recognition is evidence of the importance that the material remains of the different phases of global industrial development have today. New labor perspectives were defined, from which new concepts emerged, such as industrial landscape—which, until a few decades ago, was unexpected, since it is not possible to conceive of a building or building complex without the landscape in which it is inserted. Faced with the dilemma of how to treat an industrial cultural landscape, the most widespread solution is to preserve it as a reference for local identity, giving the inhabitants of a certain area the opportunity to integrate their life experience into its story so that it can be identified as their own and recognized as part of their history. One possible direction for this is the implementation of cultural tourism in industrial landscapes. Heritage tourism is a value that is becoming more and more established as a part of the postmodern discourse in the face of the scientific-technical advances achieved by highly developed capitalist societies.
In Cuba, international tourism that has time and money to enjoy the cultural offerings is willing to visit the historical industrial landscapes, aware of the value of this heritage. From the legal point of view, efforts to preserve the country’s industrial historical memory have been undertaken since 1977, when the Law for the Protection of Cultural Heritage established the preservation of relevant assets related to archaeology, prehistory, history, literature, education, art, and science, as well as their protection. This law allowed for the creation of the National Council for Cultural Heritage, an institution responsible for putting the legislation regarding the protection and conservation of cultural heritage into practice.
The most important Cuban industrial heritage assets are concentrated into two large groups, characterized by the activity carried out and the geographical location:
Industries that developed operations, chiefly in urban areas, linked to services, food production, and transport, such as factories for food products and beverages, electricity generation, port services, and transport of passengers and goods, among others.
Industries located mostly in rural areas and related to traditional industries: sugar, coffee, tobacco, and cocoa. These have evolved in close connection with the slave regime, and reached a peak during the nineteenth century. There are numerous sites included within this group, among which the coffee plantations and mills stand out (Figure 9.2).
Map showing the four great Cuban plantation zones
CREATED BY THE AUTHOR
Initiatives to safeguard these sites have come to life through the efforts of provincial heritage entities throughout the country. More recent projects
3 Industrial Archaeology and Its Implementation in Cuba
In recent decades, the concept of archaeology has broken the temporal and spatial barriers that have bound it since its origins in the nineteenth century, opening up new fields of research that had remained overlooked until now. Some issues have been treated from the ethnocentric perspective, such as the lives of enslaves, minorities, and women and the daily life of the popular classes. Meanwhile, the constant change of systems toward increasingly industrial and advanced societies constantly led to the disuse of a large number of buildings and machinery that had witnessed different stages of development. Another issue was that the transfer of industries to underdeveloped countries as a strategy to lower the wages of workers resulted in large industrial and mining areas being abandoned. Consequently, these industrial landscapes became the objects of economic revitalization projects and the rescue of the industrial past, which resulted in the emergence of the concept of “industrial archaeology” in the 1950s, with “industrial heritage” being its direct predecessor.
It was Michael Rix, a professor at the British University of Birmingham, who first referred to industrial archaeology in 1955, defining it as the “registration, preservation and interpretation of the sites and structures of the first industrial activities, particularly the monuments of the industrial revolution” (cited by Vicenti, 2007, p. 2). In his study, he commented that the field should intervene in factories and mills built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as the locomotives and steam engines that made it possible to obtain energy, the first buildings with iron frames, aqueducts, bridges, and the first attempts at railways, locks, canals, and other structures. However, in 1963, Kenneth Hudson recast this discipline as the one in charge of defining, discovering, cataloging, and studying the physical remains of the industrial past and thus knowing significant aspects of its working conditions, technical processes, and production processes (Vicenti, 2007). Based on this definition, the expression became the object of different interpretations due to the ambiguity
The definitions have been varied; the English, Spanish, and French schools took different positions, some more traditional than others, focusing mainly on the stages of industrial development. Finally, the research areas incorporated real looms and all small industries from the beginning of modernity to the present—with special emphasis on the capitalist stage. Industrial archaeology received worldwide recognition it was due as an important part of the archaeological discipline since most of the specialists of the “Old World” rejected the idea that there were aspects that dealt with topics such as the colony, the postcolony, or gender studies. With regard to industrial heritage, archaeology has precise tools to analyze, understand, and relate details to their historical context, since “(…) a heritage element without its consequent study becomes a meaningless continent” (Vicenti, 2007, p. 1).
Knowing the different definitions of industrial archaeology leads to reflecting on the variations in its realization. These variations are aimed at successful regional applications, encouraging the identification of several topics of interest:
- –The chronology of the concept of industrial archaeology should not be closed with respect to the sites of intervention, since the Industrial Revolution did not arrive in all regions at once.
- –Industrial Heritage is very diverse, and it is possible that this factor contributes to its relativity. For those who study industrial archaeology in Spain, a nineteenth-century loom may be significant, while for an Englishman, this same loom is unimportant when compared to the factories that were developed in this same century on English territory.
- –Archaeological investigations should not be limited to immovable evidence, ignoring contexts containing movable evidence, or to constructions generated by a specific industrial activity. Often, the interventions focus on the search for walls and other remains of the factories that made up the industries, in many cases ignoring the movable evidence resulting from human activities.
Beyond regionalisms, particularities of the industries, and the development that they have attained, it is worthwhile to reformulate a definition in accordance with the interests of those who dedicate themselves to this specialty: industrial archaeology refers to archaeological research carried out at sites where economic activities linked to specific production cycles have been developed, in which an industrial process that distinguishes and characterizes it has great preponderance.
Throughout the years and with the experience acquired, the knowledge of Cuban archaeologists in dealing with fieldwork in rural industrial contexts has been revolutionized. In the case of sugar mills, the main results are related to the identification of material evidence related to the daily life of African enslaves and plantations, variations in the design of the estates and production mechanisms, and identification of the degree of mechanization with which cane sugar was produced. In coffee plantations, typologies have been identified depending on the organization of its component parts, settlement systems and innovative designs related to their proximity to water supply sources, the preponderance of coffee processing methods-wet or dry, correlatable with the different regions of the country-, and artifacts linked to daily and productive activities. In both cases, various types of slave housing have been studied and identified (Roura, 2012), an element that directly affected the spatial distribution of the properties that made up the plantations and the number of slaves present in the endowments. Likewise, there are many interventions in slave cemeteries where remains have revealed bone pathologies resulting from continuous effort and nutritional deficiencies, as well as dental mutilations for ritual and aesthetic purposes.
The accumulation of information has promoted various initiatives related to industrial landscapes, such as the declaration of the Sierra del Rosario Biosphere Reserve (Artemisa Province) and the Archaeological Landscape of the First Coffee Plantations in Southeast Cuba as UNESCO World Heritage Sites; the execution of the Los Caminos del Café project (Santiago de Cuba and Guantánamo Provinces); the implementation of the Valle de los Ingenios Industrial Site Management Project (Trinidad, Sancti Spíritus Province); and the reconceptualization of the spaces belonging to a nineteenth-century coffee
4 Ecomuseum Las Terrazas: Manager of Industrial Archaeological Heritage
First of all, it is necessary to point out that the ecomuseum is an entity that must be born and cultivated based on the desires and needs of the community; for this, however, adequate strategies related to cultural tourism, one of the main consolidated industries worldwide, must be put into practice. This includes acknowledging heritage beyond its traditional limits of historical and artistic monuments and museums, extending to and encompassing lesser-known phenomena such as intangible heritage.
The materialization of ecomuseums largely depends on achieving a successful interweaving of identity, heritage, and historical-cultural region. These relationships are extremely complex and heterogeneous, as they are marked by anthropological, historical, geographical, psychological, linguistic, and sociological components. They become evident in society, which is where the forms of culture and their respective identity manifestations take shape. Therefore, the relationships established between the ecomuseum and the community that houses it are intrinsic and inseparable through the identity values that it treasures and promotes. The ecomuseum or territorial community museum is made up of three closely related elements that form a basic triad, from which its entire conception derives: the territory, the natural and cultural heritage, and the community.
Building + Collections + Experts + Public = Conventional Museum
Territory + Heritage + Memory + Population = Ecomuseum (Méndez, 2011, p. 1)
The oldest documentary references to the territory date from the period between 1559 and 1721, when the lands corresponding to its interior mountains and surrounding plains were granted. The Sierra del Rosario had experienced economic development for more than three centuries; this was based on the extensive breeding of cattle and pigs, concentrated in farms called corrales. Gradually, this economy declined, and the coffee plantation sustained the owners, resulting in the demolition of cattle ranches, selling the land in smaller units, and revaluing their prices.
The revolution in Saint-Domingue brought about a migratory movement of coffee growers to Cuba, leading to the establishment of more than one hundred farms in the Sierra del Rosario area. The first coffee grower, the Frenchman Jean Delaunay, arrived in the mountains in 1793; from then on, this industry began to flourish, resulting in a direct negative impact on the natural context of the region. Among the first activities was the clearing of the original forest, which, in the long term, led to the impoverishment of the soil. In addition, in the areas that would be used for coffee plantations, work was carried out toward planting subsistence crops and building pens for raising domestic animals, all based on the notion of economic sustainability from one’s own resources.
As can be deduced, the entire mountainous surface was anthropized and practically devastated. The coffee development had a direct and negative impact on the vegetation and soil, destroying the natural botanical heritage of the region. Therefore, toward the first half of the nineteenth century, the natural
The year 1968 marked the beginning of rescue efforts for the Cuban forests. The Sierra del Rosario Socioeconomic Development Plan began to be implemented, as part of the Comprehensive Development Plans, which aimed to positively intervene in affected and impoverished areas through human action; this plan is still being carried out today by the Forestry Exploitation Company. The Cuban Academy of Sciences was then summoned to carry out research, in which various institutes and departments participated.
The fundamental objective of this plan was to reforest 5,000 hectares of forest through a system of terraces with constant platforms, which would provide a strip of land for forest plantations, stopping the erosion of the mountains and achieving the restoration of the lost vegetation layer. In 1971, the Las Terrazas community was inaugurated (Figure 9.3), in which 273 family nuclei were concentrated, for a population of 1,300 inhabitants (Marcia Leyseca, personal communication, 2017). It is perfectly integrated into the natural environment,
Some houses in the Las Terrazas community
PHOTOGRAPH BY THE AUTHOR, 2016
In 1985, 25,000 hectares belonging to the Sierra del Rosario were declared as a biosphere reserve by UNESCO—the only one in Cuba that includes both man and human activities in its scope. Eight communities can be identified within the reserve, with approximately 5,000 inhabitants, distributed across small towns located in the middle of the mountains and directly linked to sustainable economic activities and environmental protection (Morena, 2003, p. 1). Human settlements interact with the natural environment through socioeconomic plans that allow for the sustainable use of natural resources.
In 1991, a tourism project for Las Terrazas began, which, taking its natural, ecological, historical, and social resources as a starting point, laid the foundations for achieving a harmonious tourism-community-environment relationship. One of the first actions was to reinvest part of the economic benefits generated by tourism into conserving natural resources and meeting the fundamental needs of the community’s inhabitants. Under the direction of the Las Terrazas Tourist Complex, research, teaching, and recreation are carried out, including nature tourism activities. Undoubtedly, one of the most important achievements has been the conversion of vestiges of nineteenth-century coffee plantations into a tourist industrial landscape, contributing to the conservation of the region’s cultural heritage and balancing the relationship between man and nature; some of these old coffee plantations are part of the trails offered to international tourists.
Starting from the fact that the community is the social site of the ecomuseum, and that 15% of its inhabitants are descendants of slaves and landowners who bear the surnames of the owners of the coffee plantations in this region, the participation of community members is recognized. The first actions were aimed at the peasants of the Sierra who voluntarily joined the community. For this reason, the tour guides, the artisans who still produce traditional products, the chefs in the tourist centers who preserve and reproduce nineteenth-century recipes, and the coffee growers and farmers in general are all community members who were born within the limits of the old coffee plantations, and they have preserved the customs and ways of yesteryear. All this has been possible thanks to an effective cooperation led by the Las Terrazas Ecomuseum and chaired by its Reference Center. Its actions are concentrated in spaces where man and nature have left their mark for more than four hundred years, where the population strives to recognize itself and build its own future.
The integration of six old coffee-growing complexes into the list of sites that make up the Las Terrazas Ecomuseum has allowed for the development of research projects of various kinds, among which are those related to archaeology. As an example of the management of Cuban archaeological heritage sites, these are inserted into the old San Pedro coffee plantation. This old hacienda was one of the largest producers in the Sierra del Rosario plantation context in the nineteenth century. Its imposing structures can still be observed today, and innovative solutions promoted its adaptation to the natural environment. For this reason, since 2011 and as part of the actions undertaken by the Cabinet of Archaeology of the Office of the Historian of Havana, in collaboration with the Ecomuseum Las Terrazas, the Archaeological Intervention Project in the Cafetal San Pedro has been developed (Figure 9.4). This arose from the clear need to investigate the history and specificities of the industry that flourished in said region between the years 1790 and 1850. The characteristics present in this coffee plantation make it sui generis in the country, due to the design of
Plan of the San Pedro coffee plantation, where the spatial distribution of its components can be observed
The documentation found in the National Archive of Cuba and other regional archives makes it possible to confirm that this plantation was promoted in the first years of the nineteenth century in part of the lands belonging to the El Cuzco corral. One of the most active coffee plantations in the Sierra del Rosario, it kept producing for approximately fifty years, considering that in 1804, it was already reported to be under the ownership of the North American Pedro Leret, its builder and sole owner (Roura & Oliva, 2015).
The site is 7,000 m away from the Las Terrazas community; it was located in a small valley between two elevations, one of its most significant assets; its former owner designed it in a wedge-shaped, staggered manner, allowing the waters generated by runoff from the mountains to pour directly into the river. Currently, the following structures can be observed in the old hacienda: drying rooms, bakery, retaining walls, master and secondary channels, some walls corresponding to the domestic area, ramps, stairs, paths, gardens, and probable warehouse areas, among others that are not identified. The location of the coffee plantations in mountainous areas, in most cases, makes it possible to identify the intramontane valleys, the slopes and the tops of the mountains, as the areas where the landowners founded their farms, not only in eastern Cuba, but also throughout the national territory; those located in the plains should be the object of further investigation. The batey1 of the San Pedro coffee plantation can be classified as a group configuration, and within this, there is a variant in which no central axis is perceived and spatial organization is determined by the proximity of the architectural components, the drying rooms being the most significant elements of the composition, occupying most of the surface of the batey.
The factors that motivated the start of archaeological research were diverse:
- –Presence of a complex hydraulic drainage system, within which various open and underground solutions can be recognized.
- –Location and type of the unknown dwelling house.
- –Location and typology of the unknown slave dwelling.
- –Unknown access road to the plantation.
- –Establishment of the unknown cemetery.
- –Little historical information regarding the endowment of slaves.
- –Innovative architectural solution in the construction of the bakery, the only one of its kind on the island.
- –Presence of wall elements that suggest the terraces of the plantation area.
It was also verified that the entire area of the batey was filled with rocks, with the aim of leveling the land to achieve higher quality in the construction work. The location of the dwelling house, the kitchen, and the coffee selection area and the use of stone slabs for floors in all areas of the coffee plantation were verified. The footprints on the access bridge to the plantation and two decorative forms of tejamaní,2 or beaver tail, were also found: evidence of the creativity of local potters and of homeowners’ concern for the appearance and functionality of their homes.
The study of the skeletal remains and associated materials in the cemetery allowed researchers to corroborate the burial of a landowner: a very rare fact, taking into account that “whites” were preferably buried in general cemeteries located in the villages. Everything seems to indicate that not all coffee plantations in the region had a cemetery, a hypothesis generated from an analysis of the previous document; therefore, the discovery and study of this space was of vital importance to the recovery of elements fundamentally linked to the particularities of the slave supply.
Two graves and two burials were identified, each in different directions. The use of mortuary boxes is not evidenced, and the position of the tombs did not indicate that there was any arrangement of the burials within the cemetery. The discovery and exploration of the surrounding areas allowed the corroboration and enrichment of the data obtained in the historical research. The hypothesis that slave cemeteries were located far from the productive areas and main dwellings, on the bank opposite the rivers, was confirmed. The study
In the case of San Pedro—as this constitutes one of the sites that make up the Las Terrazas Ecomuseum—the results of such investigations are implemented almost immediately, through the organization of workshops focused on updating the knowledge of the guides and workers of the tourist complex. The institution encourages visits to the site, publishes work reviews in local periodicals, and reports directly to community members. Likewise, it promotes the composition of graduate or postgraduate theses related to the archaeological project, and renews the artifactual samples present in the Reference Center. Currently, a 3D reconstruction of the site started, and signage that will be part of the old coffee plantation is being designed, contributing to the site’s process of patrimonialization.
The interplay between Ecomuseo Las Terrazas and industrial archaeological sites is indissoluble, as museum, community, and sites are integrated into a whole, focused on the sustainable management of their cultural heritage and contributing to its conservation and enhancement. A nexus between nature and archaeology is perceived, consolidating itself as a center where the visitor can explore the history of the population and its customs, in the same way that they can visit all its natural and industrial landscapes. The discourse has focused on the territory and cultural sedimentation in analyzing the transformations produced by the different human groups that inhabited it: it constitutes an example of the nexus between natural and cultural heritage.
6 Conclusions
The archaeological excavations at the San Pedro coffee plantation have allowed the work of the ecomuseum to be socialized, in addition to revaluing the site as one of the most important deposits within the Cuban plantation context of the nineteenth century (in the Sierra del Rosario in particular), with novel construction solutions that allowed for maximum productivity for approximately fifty years. The archaeological project, carried out thanks to the collaboration of the institution to which it belongs, has led to the rebirth of the specialty in the town after a several-year absence of research related to the regional industrial landscape.
The success of the work of the Las Terrazas Ecomuseum is thus reaffirmed, demonstrating the effectiveness of the patrimonialization and implementation of ecomuseums related to industrial archaeological heritage sites. This experience has allowed the community members to live in an environment of
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