The Valle de los Ingenios is found in the proximities of the old town of Trinidad de Cuba, which became wealthy during the time of its sugar cane plantations. At the height of its development, the city and its sugar mills had over eleven thousand slaves with a total population of around twenty-eight thousand. Nowadays, these are devastated lands. The fields once covered in forest, and later in sugar cane, are now dry, burnt and exhausted. The winter sun is weak but constant and the light blue sky signals a lack of rain. Today there is no sugar cane, or anything else, just the fire licking up the grassland and some cattle - dairy perhaps - as in Cuba there isn't much beef. The smoke rises up to an already whitened sky, lacking in oxygen, the flames heat the charred land and destroy the small possibility there is of any other type of vegetation surviving, except for grass - more prone to catching fire again. The forest was devastated by a bloody history, and both - history and forest - leave almost no traces. A few abandoned buildings, poor villages inhabited by black people who for centuries have remained in this place, around the old sugar plantations. Devastated lands, forgotten history.
The museum you get to by train is a restaurant. The museum, an old plantation farm house, now serves Creole food - the ever present rice and beans in its Cuban version
moros y cristianos, with pork and whatever root vegetables –
viandas - are available. In the back yard, an old iron sugar cane grinder, made in Buffalo, USA. And there, two black women wait for the tourists to ask for a glass of
guarapo. That’s it. At the rum museum, the scene is similar. The guides explain: “It all started with the arrival of sugar cane… then came the plantations and the slaves…But what really matters is that at the beginning of the 19thC production was mechanized, there were machines and the rail roads...” And in this way, around three hundred years of history were chewed up and swallowed in a matter of seconds. Could it be that the refined alcoholic drink, now distilled by the French, hides an ugly truth, too shameful to be acknowledged? A history that is, perhaps, too undignified for French and Cubans alike to want to remember?
I thought that perhaps the Revolution would value this history. Perhaps a little. In Havana there is the Casa de África commemorating post-revolutionary African-Cuban relations and also the Orishas Museum. Nowadays,
santeria, Afro-Cuban religion, is recognised and growing. Paradoxically, however, the history of slavery is better told in Pinar del Río, which is best known for its smallholdings not slave plantations. There is a reconstruction of a
Palenque - to where the
negros cimarrones (runaway slaves) escaped. However, in the Valle de los Ingenios and in the streets of old Trinidad, this history seems hard to discern. It is said that José Martí wanted the abolition of slavery and that black people were on the side of independence. They were, apparently, the ones that most benefited from
La Revolución. But here, in the Valle, counter-revolution was strong. Sugar plantations, old masters and conservatism usually go together.
Valle de los Ingenios
If in Cuba liberation from colonialism and abolition walked hand in hand, things were slightly different in Brazil. Princess Isabel abolished slavery in 1888 and even today she is kept alive in cultural symbolisms, despite the fact that the princess represented the last government in the whole of the Americas - entirely affected by slavery - to give slaves their freedom. In Brazil, in the
Vale do Café, a region in Rio de Janeiro's
Vale do Paraíba, history is told in its own way. You can sleep in farm houses turned into hotels smelling of waxed hardwood, dine using silver cutlery and, during the Winter Festival, hear classical music in the salons of these glorious properties in improvised saraus or soirées, or perhaps in the centre of the historic city of Vassouras - the old capital of this coffee region. You can hear stories glorifying the Coffee Barons, visit beautiful plantation houses in colonial style and their avenues of Cuban imperial palms. Here, the majority of tourists are white (or almost all white as Brazilian singer-song writer Caetano Veloso would once have said) playing the eternal part of the masters, and the workers black, in their symmetrical and opposite roles of servitude.
If Cuba is embarrassed or forgets to re-affirm and to value its history, perhaps believing that socialism is able to erase the problem (and the history) of race, in the Brazilian Coffee Valley we can still breath in slavery, as real as the thick morning mist covering the Vale do Paraíba in winter. One cannot avoid the many and constant contrasts. Not far from the industrialized, steel-producing Volta Redonda, is Barra do Piraí, messy and dirty, somewhat forgotten and still cut by railway lines – a rarity in Brazil. There are some historical farms in the suburbs of the city, not in the countryside, but still within the city limits. But the farms are the countryside, and further out, there are villages, small communities and
quilombos – legally recognised communities originally made up of ex-slaves. A black population (or almost black), forgotten and poor. Of course, some of the old plantations take their black history a little more seriously. For example, the
Fazenda Ponte Alta, has kept the
senzala buildings (slave quarters) intact and one of its black workers takes part in the theatrical sarau which tells the history of the farm and the region. Others are less embarrassed about glorifying their master-slave past, telling the histories of the men who braved these lands and who received imperial titles because of the wealth brought by the coffee planted with slave hands.
Being in the
Vale do Café is like being inside a time machine which reveals two parallel histories through two different rail roads. One that goes from the Vale do Paraíba down to Rio de Janeiro, the other leaves from the port of Santos towards the São Paulo state hinterlands. With the cycle of cutting down native forest, planting, land exhaustion, cutting down more virgin forest - and as slavery came to an end - coffee cultivation moved out of the Vale do Paraíba, eventually reaching the west of the State of São Paulo. The Vale’s black population was allowed to remain on the land, sometimes even receiving plots from their ex-masters. Land, which by now was infertile and exhausted. The railroad that once sent coffee to the ports of Rio de Janeiro, now took ex-slaves and their children to the old capital, in search of a better life. Thus villages, communities,
quilombos and "
favelas" were born. Around 500km away, immigrants left the port of Santos, which had not seen much development since the 16th C, to work on the regenerated coffee activity in the west of São Paulo, not as slaves, but as free men. It was, doubtless, very hard work, which many bemoaned, and from which many escaped, but it was paid work, for people with different rights and who were given different concessions and in different lands.
This is not an unknown history, and yet, how many people in Brazil remember that coffee was originally a slave-based culture? For many, this crop is romantically associated to the idea of the hard-working immigrant, which has sometimes led to absurd comparisons between the supposed "incapacity" of the Brazilian black population with the "productivity" of non-black immigrants. Because of the open scars it still carries, the Vale do Café is enlightening; it makes it possible for us to better understand the events of over a century ago. History cuts the land as deep as the erosion craters that have been destroying the Vale since the times when its fertile forests were cut down to plant the first coffee bushes, where the cattle still grazes the wounded land and coffee is no longer found.
Coffee Grinder, Fazenda Ponte Alta
Like Cuba, a devastated land, like Cuba, the cattle, the dryness, the thick winter morning fog, the charred land, the lack of rain, the whitened blue sky, a vague reminder of a lush vegetation that was lost to produce a devastating monoculture; like Cuba, the people forgotten around the now non-existent plantations. Cuba is drier, its forest decimated, broken, crippled by the climatic consequences past and present, a tropical country with no fruit. On the other hand, the south eastern region of Brazil needed many more forests to be cut before Rio de Janeiro in July could feel as dry as Lisbon. Perhaps I am being a little unfair to Cuba. However while the Vale do Paraíba's slave heritage is strong, this is not out of a conscious willingness to reaffirm history. It is because it is the social consequence of a type of development that has never been dealt with or even attenuated or placated.
Apart from the blatant work division, the opposites of wealth-poverty, city-rural, white-black, the Vale do Café's own Winter Festival stands as the utmost symbol of this heritage. The cultural programme is classical, European; erudite shows which condescend to give space to the local folklore on the last Sunday of the festival. What attracted me to the Vale was
Jongo. To watch a Jongo presentation in the Vale do Café had been one of the reasons for my trip. On Sunday night, the community groups of the region, including those also presenting
Folia dos Reis and
Calongos were playing all at the same time and competing for the same space in the middle of the main square. The stage which was set up for the festival had now been pulled down, the majority of tourists had already gone home. All groups were "on stage" together - and separately. I knew about the subtleness of
Jongo, its codified chants, challenges between players, the respect with which members held their eldest. All this was lost in a Babylon of presentations, a cacophony of drums and colours and sounds. By chance, I bumped into one of the Festival's organisers and I asked: Why? Did the groups not deserve to be enjoyed individually? Perhaps they did not need to be on stage, their performance was more suited to the ground. But why did they need to perform all together? She simply answered "This is all there is to
Jongo, there is nothing else to see". In the white town constructed by black hands, in modern times in Brazil, we still can see the erudite for the educated elite and the fun for the others at the end of the party. But why should the organizer care? Today, in the Vale do Paraíba, there no longer are any foreign visitors to become mesmerized by the "primitive dancing" of the black population.
Senzala, Fazenda Ponte Alta, RJ, Brazil
Jongo in Vassouras
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JuliaFelmanas 03/09
