Retaining, Reconstructing, and Recreating African Ethnic Identities in Cuba: The Relocation of Havana's Cabildos de Nación

Based upon documents from Spanish and Cuban archives, this paper asks how Havana’s role as a major destination for the trans-Atlantic slave trade created conditions that fostered collective identities rooted in a general and sometime very specific place of origin in Africa?   In answering this question, the paper focuses on the religious and mutual-aid-societies formed and operated by Africans that evolved over the centuries from lay religious brotherhoods to collective voluntary associations known as cabildos de nación. These societies offer fruitful intervention into current debates over African Diasporic culture in the Americas because cabildos de nación both perpetuated African ethnic identities by grouping Congos, Lucumis, and Carabalis together in voluntary associations, and served to create new creolized cultures that spoke to their experiences in Cuba.   The actions and activities of these African ethnic societies became particularly visible in Havana and the historical records of the 1790s when the trans-Atlantic slave trade dramatically increased the slave population in the city and the houses these societies owned and operated were forcefully relocated outside the city walls. Although the trans-Atlantis slave trade was most certainly the most powerful force in creating notions of blackness and whiteness, it also simultaneous created conditions for multiple African cultures to thrive in Havana.  The Africans who arrived in Havana from the horrific middle passage employed the cabildo societies and their houses as a strategy to connect with other Africans who shared a similar history rooted in a geographic location on the other side of the Atlantic.