“El Príncipe de los Montes”: Marronage, Commerce, and Atlantic Connections Between Jamaica and Cuba, 1655–76

Sebastián Congo was brought to the eastern Cuban town of Bayamo alongside his owner from Jamaica after the island was taken by the English. His owner, the son of the governor of Jamaica, quickly ingratiated himself within eastern Cuban society and became a sugar plantation owner and cattle baron. As his enslaver rose to prominence and built connections around the settlements of Bayamo and Santiago de Cuba, Sebastián Congo ran to the mountains alongside twenty other enslaved Africans where they created an alternative society to that offered by Spanish colonialism.

This paper examines the twenty-year period from the English capture of Jamaica until Sebastián Congo’s eventual capture and execution. During this time, Cuba increasingly relied on the institution of slavery and embraced sugar cultivation. With non-Iberian colonies surrounding the island, merchants from English Jamaica brought hundreds of enslaved Africans to the shores of Bayamo and Santiago de Cuba. This unfettered access to the transatlantic slave trade fundamentally changed the island, and individuals like Sebastián Congo took to the wilderness to escape enslavement. As his former owner became intimately involved in the finer points of illicit trade with these Jamaican merchants, Sebastián Congo and his men relied on these very same merchants to survive.

This presentation seeks to show the commercial connections forged between residents of eastern Cuba and Jamaica in the third quarter of the seventeenth century. As both islands fundamentally changed and transformed because of enslavement, maroon communities spread across eastern Cuba to escape colonialism. Despite this, both the local elite of eastern Cuba and the maroon communities traded flagrantly with merchants coming from Port Royal. Studying these connections show how islands throughout the Caribbean traded across imperial lines and relied on both maritime and terrestrial geographies to make a living.