Santiago de Cuba’s Memories of Haiti

Sitting against the partially shredded leather of a bright pink classic car, I watched the streets of Santiago de Cuba roll past my window. My taxi driver, a charismatic young man, eagerly played me songs with an unmistakably Caribbean feel by his favorite rappers from Santiago. Once the car crawled to a stop, he donned a silver tooth smile and held out his hand — “Cinco mami.”

“Euros,” he added.

Marissa’s first ride through the streets of Santiago de Cuba. In Cuba, it’s common for drivers to self-engineer their cars to play music videos stored on flash-drives. Despite the U.S blockade preventing the import of many necessities, Cuban’s maintain and modernize their Soviet-era cars, championing ingenuity and innovation. Photo by Marissa Joseph.

With the Cuban currency falling victim to an ever-worsening exchange rate, I learned quickly that foreign plata functioned as the shares of an informal Cuban stock market. The naval blockade established in 1962 endures through the current U.S embargo of Cuba, exacerbating the growing economic crisis in Cuba. Fuel shortages besieged the country and inflation had reached extremely high levels. At my accommodation, an electricity blackout greeted me alongside my accommodation’s manager, Vilma, and her 19-year-old daughter.  

I was no stranger to the imperfect conditions that took form across the island due to decades of imperialist policies and colonial suppression. From my first visit to Havana nearly six years earlier, I’ve held a fascination with Cuba due to the palpable strength of its people despite the efforts of the colonial world to subdue their progress and suffocate their spirit. As a child of Haitian immigrants, I feel a deep bond with the Cuban people as a legacy of perseverance and resistance intertwined our histories. From the city’s world-renowned Carnival to the thousands of Haitians of Cuban descent who live throughout the province, I constantly encountered omnipresent whispers of the Haitian Revolution in Santiago de Cuba.

Fleeing the Haitian Revolution in the late 18th century, French planters pioneered Santiago de Cuba’s transformation into the leading hub for sugar and coffee production. Beginning with the slaves from Saint-Domingue, as Haiti was known then, who arrived alongside their French masters, Haitian culture has played a crucial role in the development of Cubanidad — the imagined identity that embodies Cuba’s essence, resistance, and vibrancy. Within the plantation, the former inhabitants of Saint-Domingue facilitated ideological and cultural exchanges with the growing African slave population, planting the seeds for the eastern province of Santiago de Cuba to become the nation’s epicenter of French Caribbean influence.

View from the balcony of La Casa de Diego Velázquez. Photo by Marissa Joseph.

Upon arrival in Santiago, I visited La Casa de Diego Velázquez, the oldest house in Cuba where the island’s first governor resided. Beautifully preserved, La Casa de Velázquez now serves as a museum. Its exhibits trace the eastern region’s development from a rural back country, deemed inferior by elites in Havana due to its large Black population, to the birthplace of Cuba’s sugar economy. While its architecture reflected the typical Spanish colonial style, the adornments throughout the house provided an account of the French planters who brought their wealth from the prosperous sugar colony of Saint-Domingue to Cuba. As we walked through its halls, the museum proudly displayed the fine china and silks introduced by the French.

However, I found myself fascinated, not with the elegant china, but rather the untold stories of enslaved women and domestic servants brought from Haiti who likely served coffee in them.

I remember reading anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s groundbreaking text, Silencing the Past, in which he provides an analysis of the Haitian-Revolution and its unthinkable challenge to slavery and colonialism. Throughout his book, Trouillot argues that global power structures, born from colonialism, have produced a dominant historical narrative with notable “silences,” denying a place for marginalized people and cultures. The western world’s failure to recognize The Haitian Revolution, the colonial world’s first successful slave rebellion, as one of the most significant events in history epitomizes this silencing of the past.

Nevertheless, in efforts to reveal the gaps in our historical memory, new silences emerge. Scholarship exceedingly positions men as the protagonist of Latin America’s revolutionary history, leaving the contributions and conditions of women and queer people understudied and underappreciated. Both in Haiti and among Cubans of Haitian descent, women are often symbolically referred to as “potomitans,” the center post of a Vodou temple that holds up its foundation. Across the diaspora, Haitian women are the axis from which their community turns, yet their stories have gone neglected by historians.

Seeking to honor the silenced Haitian women to come before me in my upcoming senior thesis, I went to Santiago de Cuba to uncover the forgotten narratives of the generations of Haitianas, Cuban women of Haitian descent, who have kept the legacy of Haiti alive in Santiago through their cultural production and transfer of ancestral memory.

Walking through the streets of Tivoli, a neighborhood widely described as a romantic oasis of Afro-centricity, the presence of Blackness was so prevalent that it almost became mundane. Overlooking the steps of Padre Pico, we watched as a group of young men listened to music on a small radio. I usually struggled to keep up the quick paced patchwork of Cuban Spanish, but to my surprise, the boys occasionally spoke phrases in Haitian Creole.

I learned that the young men were all second or third-generation Cubans. Their ancestors likely arrived in Cuba in the early 20th century during the U.S occupation of Haiti. Corporations like the United Fruit Company recruited thousands of Haitian and Jamaican sugarcane cutters or braceros to work as seasonal laborers in Cuba. Many of the Haitians braceros stayed in Cuba beyond the harvest and in 1917, the Cuban government passed a law allowing Haitian women to join their husbands working in Cuba. Following a rise in nationalist rhetoric, the government repatriated a significant amount Haitian braceros and their families; however, those who remained retreated to enclaves throughout the eastern provinces. Within these communities, Haitian women played a critical role in preserving Haitian culture through their domestic, spiritual, and social labor.

Matiti shows Marissa a picture of her altar, used ceremoniously to offer gifts up to the lwas or spirits of Haitian Vodou. She often cooks the food alongside her daughter and granddaughter so that they may carry on the spiritual tradition. Photo by Marissa Joseph.

Odilia “Matiti” Solo Soyé, a woman born in the predominately Haitian town of Thompson, proclaimed proudly to me in an interview that she was a third-generation high-priestess or mambo of Haitian Vodou. Matiti gained her knowledge of Vodou and its spiritual practices from her mother, a haitiana who learned from her Haitian grandmother. As mothers, it was their duty to protect their family heritage and ensure the traditions and customs of their ancestors are never lost. Now training her own daughters and granddaughter to become mambos, Matiti continues the historical project to assert the distinct cultural identity of Haitians in Cuba. Hearing about the critical role of Haitian women in maintaining the visibility of Haitian culture that persists in Santiago de Cuba today left me with the question that drives my upcoming senior thesis: how did Cuban women of Haitian descent pass down a collective imaginary of Haiti across generations and how did their transfer of this memory shape the shifted perceptions of race and nationhood in post-revolutionary Cuba?

An exhibit in the Museo de Carnaval featuring the various tumbas or drums played by hand after a vocalist begins during performances of La Tumba Francesa. The songs are typically sung in kreyol-cubano, a blend of Haitian Creole and Spanish. Photo by Marissa Joseph.

I found part of my answer at El Museo de Carnaval, a shrine dedicated to celebrating the history of Santiago’s famous Carnaval and uplifting the imprint of Haitian and Jamaican influence on the city. Alongside the walls of the museum rest dozens of documents and newspapers chronicling the processions. Situated with a particular importance was a plaque dedicated to La Tumba Francesa, a musical style developed by societies of enslaved Haitians in Cuba during the 19^th century. Led by Haitian women, the group and its performances have become a defining quality of Santiago de Cuba’s cultural heritage.  

In the next room, I encountered a group of young girls watching intently as their dance instructor moved furiously, teaching them to stomp and sway to the beat of the drums being played by two young men. Each blow signaled the heartbeat of Haiti’s spirit that gave energy and life to the descendants of a revolutionary people. The students’ mothers lined the sides of the room, quietly evaluating their pupil’s performance. As the instructor began to sing over the beat, the dancers stepped in time to each incantation and every movement was hundreds of years in the making.  

View of the Sierra Maestra mountains as the sun sets over Santiago. Photo by Marissa Joseph