Running to and from Utopia: Miguel Barnet’sBiography of a Runaway Slave

Abstract

In 1963, Cuban ethnologist Miguel Barnet read a newspaper article on one hundred and three-year-old ex-Cuban slave Esteban Montejo (1860–1973) and interviewed him that same year. Barnet edited the transcripts of this interview, and the resulting manuscript, titled Biografía de un cimarrón [Biography of a Runaway Slave, also The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave], was published by Cuba’s Instituto de Etnología and Folklore in 1966. Given that this was a time of revolutionary fervor in Cuba, Barnet’s editing is not without ideological motivation, but the basic environmental/agricultural observations in the piece are not affected by overt political distortion. Importantly, in terms of this study, Montejo’s spiritual attitudes toward Nature are allowed to shine through. The spiritual element is important because it offers a valuable contrast to the dominant social discourse regarding the Cuban environment, both natural and human. For example, Reinaldo Funes Monzote’s classic From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba: An Environmental History since 1492 [De bosque a sabana: azúcar, deforestación y medio ambiente en Cuba 1492–1926] focuses on the economic and political history of Cuba, essentially from the end of the eighteenth century to 1926, and deals primarily with the competing interests of private property owners and the state. The competing interests in question were those of the large sugar plantations which sought to constantly clear ever more forest to increase production and the needs of the Royal Spanish Navy for a renewable supply of timber for ship construction. The plantation system required extensive slave holdings and large-scale forest conversion in order to prosper, while the Royal Navy’s system was based upon small-scale farming, free labor, and large-scale forest conservation. As Funes Monzote observes: