Saving What Remains: Ecclesiastical Records of the African Diaspora in Baracoa, Bayamo, Santiago, and Trinidad, Cuba

In this phase, we will travel to four of the original seven Cuban “villas,” founded in the early sixteenth century, to access the documentary collections that remain, plan long-term digitization projects, and establish local collaborative networks that will facilitate this work.  The presentation will also explore the related topics of how these documents can potentially contribute to historical scholarship and how these experiences might indicate future avenues of international collaboration between Cuban and American scholars. The advent of digital technologies of reproduction, storage, and dissemination have paired with the dramatic growth in scholarship on the African diaspora.  Projects such as this one have the potential to deepen and expand our knowledge in this fields, as well as other related areas such as demographic, medical, cultural, and other categories of historical inquiry.