Return of the Slaves

Abstract

Sergio Giral’s historical drama Rancheador is situated during a period in Cuba’s slaving past when incidences of cimarronage had increased significantly. Economic factors contributed to the robust proliferation of slave rebellions, and stemmed, in the main, from the falling market value of coffee. Very early on in the film, we hear from the guajiro (peasant) Morales that low coffee prices have threatened his family’s economic survival, and it soon becomes clear that, due to their financial troubles, the local campesinos (countryfolk) are at the mercy of the sugar-producing aristocracy’s rapacious land claims. Slaves are even more vulnerable to the market’s whims, as coffee-estate owners resort to selling off their surplus workforce. In a scene indicative of this trend, a slave woman and her son are presented for sale as a single lot at the auction block. Routine bidding ensues among the assembled crowd until the stakes are abruptly raised by a widow, dressed from head to toe in funereal black, who calls out a competitive offer for the woman alone. Her bid seals the win, and the anguished slave woman is promptly wrestled out of her child’s frenzied reach. Through this small cameo, Giral poignantly suggests the reason for the higher incidences of slave rebellion: the power of relation. Relation likewise appears to explain why, as we observe in the film, runaways had the practice of returning to the plantation by day from their nocturnal hideaways in the mountains: for if health, opportunity, or other circumstance prevented loved ones from escaping captivity, personal relations could only be maintained in this manner.

To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you.¹

When an ox is sacrificed to the spirits of the true ancestors in Dahomey, a goat is also offered for the sake of those sold into slavery. The priests chant: “Oh ancestors, do all that is in your power/so that the princes and noblemen who rule us today/shall never be sent far away from here as slaves./Punish the people who bought our relations/those who will never be seen again. Send their ships to the port of Whydah … drown their crews/and let all the riches in their boats come back to Dahomey.”²