Uncovering the Indigenous Indies: Colonial Cuba as Case Study

Join us for a presentation by Dr. John Paul Paniagua during which he will offer an alternative narrative of the early conquest and colonization that de-emphasizes Native dissolution and extinction. Instead, it explores the formation of an early Caribbean labor regime built on both the Spanish encomienda and Indigenous enslavement. This nexus explains not just why so many Indians suffered and died, but how the Indigenous survived the way they did. Rather than a quick extermination, cascading social reproduction crises produced thousands of deracinated survivors—that is, survivors uprooted from their communities and cultures.
Consequently, surviving Native communities in the Greater Antilles were suspended between their own claims to Indigenous ancestry and how various imperial regimes defined them as incoherent populations. In colonial Cuba, from the 16th to the 18th century, Spanish officials repeatedly dismissed the authenticity of Native communities on the island, suggesting that they were frauds from the Atlantic world or the vestiges of Indigenous communities that had long ago lost their “Color.” Charting these contestations and attending to the formation, composition, and litigiousness of Native “pueblos de indios,” the talk will demonstrate that indigeneity in Cuba was neither extinguished nor static; it was actively (re)created by a diverse community of indios who used histories rooted in the island’s past and legal strategies routed across the Spanish American colonies.
The program will conclude with comments from Dr. Traci A. Ardren and a question and answer session with the audience.
This event is co-sponsored by the University of Miami’s Department of History, Emilio Bacardí Moreau Chair in Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, and Department of Anthropology.

Host or Publisher University of Miami Libraries