Esteban Montejo, the story of Cuba’s last Cimarrón slave

Guillermo G. Espinosa
Journalist and historian, Havana, Cuba

While reading the newspaper, Miguel Barnet came across a photo that caught his eye – an article about a 104-year-old Afro-descendant, the son of captives brought to this Caribbean island during the last shipment of African slaves in the mid-19^th century. His name was Esteban Montejo, and he had been a slave before fleeing as a teenager into the forests of Cuba’s central mountains to gain his freedom. He was the last Cimarron.

As a sociology student at the University of Havana, Miguel Barnet immediately realized the interest of his testimony. He went to the Veterans’ Centre to meet this tall, youthful man with bright eyes. In the 1960s, it seemed impossible to still be able to find a Cimarron slave in this country, let alone a man whose life had begun in the Spanish colonial era and ended under Fidel Castro’s socialist revolution, after having lived through the wars of independence and the intervention of the United States in 1898.

Three years of interviews and writing culminated in a book, Biografia de un Cimarrón published in 1966 (The Autobiography Of A Runaway Slave, 1968). Written in the first person, the story had a huge impact, well beyond Cuba’s borders. The book has been published in many languages and countries – 64 editions at the last count – not to mention unofficial publications, according to Miguel Barnet’s assistant, Lázaro Castilla.

This story is part of an already well-established literary tradition in the country. The theme of slavery appeared in the early 19^th century in the essays of Félix Varela (1788-1853), considered a precursor of Cuban intellectual thought, and his disciple José Antonio Saco (1797-1879). At a time when African contributions to Cuba’s Hispanic heritage were viewed with a certain amount of condescension, Fernando Ortiz (1881-1969) – the pioneer of national anthropology and a Barnet scholar – dared to assert that, on the largest island in the Antilles, there had been a “transculturation” by the black people who had been brought by force from Africa, and by their descendants. Between 1763 and 1845, hundreds of thousands of people arrived on the island to work, in particular, on the sugar plantations.

Ortiz’s research changed the course of Cuba’s cultural perception of itself. Following in Ortiz’s footsteps, Miguel Barnet was able to assert, after listening to Esteban Montejo’s account, that “much of the character of the Cuban man was to be found in him”.

Now aged 84, Barnet still remembers his meetings with the old man, lugging a heavy tape recorder. The first meetings between Esteban and this young researcher with Catalan roots were not easy. “He looked at me with suspicion and mistrust,” he writes in the appendix to one of the editions of his book. The presence of the tape recorder helped, though – Montejo was fascinated by the reproduction of his voice. “He became aware that he was an important person,” he explains.

A testimony for posterity, the book depicts the miserable condition of the barracones – the basic shacks where the slaves lived – the back-breaking work in the Flor de Sagua sugar mill, and the corporal punishment meted out on slaves, including children, giving a very tangible vision of the violence of the slave system. The book also describes the young man’s solitude in the mountains, foraging for food and medicinal herbs, and the more contemplative moments spent watching birds, bats and reptiles.

The story is also an invaluable source of information on daily life on the island at the end of the 19^th century, on the practice of Afro-Cuban religions – particularly Santería – as well as on dances, traditional medicine and games.  

Montejo lived hidden away in caves and groves until the day Black emancipation was decreed in 1886. There was a great commotion from the plantations. “From the cries of the people, I knew that slavery had come to an end... When I left the mountain, I started walking and came across an old woman with two children in her arms. ‘Tell me,’ I asked her, ‘is it true that we are no longer slaves?’ She replied: ‘No, son, now we’re free’”, recounts Miguel Barnet in his book.  

Barnet describes his work as a “testimonial novel”, inspired by an account of the life of a Mexican Indian, entitled Juan Pérez Jolote, Biografía de un tzotzil (Juan the Chamula), published in 1952 by the anthropologist Ricardo Pozas. Biografia de un Cimarrón is a first-person narrative that confronts the reader with the orality of a man who mixes Cuban peasant oral expressions with bits of African and Caribbean-Indian language, adapted to give the text a literary feel.

The Autobiography Of A Runaway Slave is unique in the historiography of slavery in Cuba and Latin America. Its impact was such that, after its publication, Montejo’s life inspired an opera by the German composer Hans Werner Henze, an adaptation by the German poet and essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and a reading by the actor and director Jean Vilar of the Comédie française.

Barnet went on to write other books of personal accounts. One of them, Gallego [The Galician], pays tribute to the migrant workers of north-west Spain. In 1997, he obtained UNESCO support for the creation of a National Slave Route Museum in a 17^th century Spanish fortress in the Cuban port of Matanzas, the cradle of Afro-Cuban culture.

“For him, the African component of Cuban culture is crucial,” says Nancy Morejón, a Cuban poet who remembers the poem entitled Ebbó (“purification” in Yoruba) para los esclavos. “It’s an anti-colonial approach to our roots, which he wrote in a colloquial style, without sacrificing formal beauty.”

The writer remembers the day when Miguel took her to see Esteban Montejo. “He was 110 years old. He was lying down. And he said to us, ‘A machete is all I need’”, the phrase that ends the biography, referring to his life as a soldier, cane-cutter and fugitive in the high forests.