Comparing Heritage Plantation Sites

The last decades of the twentieth century witnessed a growing interest in developing former slave plantations into heritage sites, tourist attractions, and even hotels. About one century after legal slavery was fully abolished in the hemisphere, “Plantation America” became exploitable in a different way, as an attraction for travelers and tourists.Footnote ⁹ In Cuba, the administrator of La Dionisia coffee plantation of Matanzas started to receive independent visitors in the late 1980s and 1990s and now, with the expansion of tourism, he receives weekly organized tours. The already mentioned Hacienda Buena Vista in Puerto Rico opened its doors in late 1987 and its administrators report that this “protected natural area” (which also happens to be a place that once held people in bondage) receives “nearly 40,000 visitors a year.”Footnote ¹⁰ The development of plantation tourism in Rio de Janeiro's Paraíba Valley in Brazil emerged also in the 1980s and 1990s. The ruins of some fazendas (plantations) were acquired and refurbished by wealthy Brazilians and foreigners, and other plantations that had remained in the hands of the descendants of the old barons followed the trend, opening their doors to local and foreign visitors.Footnote ¹¹ Also kept within the family is St. Nicholas Abbey, a former sugar plantation in Barbados that has been opened at least since the 1980s.

Some years ago, I started to pay attention to representations of slavery (or the lack thereof) in a variety of public sites, but specifically plantations such as the ones mentioned above.Footnote ¹² The Anglo-Saxon and Iberian heritage of the sites mentioned presents a fertile terrain for comparative analysis, one that becomes more complex and challenging if one considers the present-day context in which these plantations exist and perform their role as sites for public history. The coffee fazendas in Brazil and the plantations in Barbados and Dominica are in the hands of private owners, while in Puerto Rico, a non-profit organization administers the Hacienda Buena Vista, and the state owns the land of La Dionisia in Cuba. At the same time, the socio-economic and political realities of each country are different, to say the least, with Cuban socialism certainly distant from the capitalism of Barbados and Dominica, and Brazil's extreme class polarization and social inequality contrasting with Puerto Rico's social structure with its large middle class—all this without mentioning differences in the ethno-racial composition of each of these countries. Nonetheless, despite these major political, economic, and social differences, all these countries have developed plantations into tourist destinations.

Plantations in the Americas were centers of production based on slave labor. The luxurious houses and lifestyle for which they are known today was secondary and dependent on their economic role in slave societies throughout the hemisphere. It must therefore be a perverse irony from the point of view of the descendants of African slaves that the “Great House” remains at the center of contemporary plantation histories in most of the locations mentioned above. This is either because most of the tours concentrate on the houses themselves and their contents, or because it is inside the houses where plantation tours reach their climax or conclusion. The operational and technological elements of the plantation occupy a secondary role on most tours, which do not necessarily mention explicitly the dominant institution of forced labor. On most of the plantations visited, aspects of life and labor of the enslaved receive less attention, are not integrated into the tour, and are often not supported by material evidence—in some cases, ruins of slave quarters were destroyed, used for a different purpose, or simply not refurbished.Footnote ¹³

The story of St. Nicholas Abbey in Barbados dates back to the seventeenth century, and it prides itself on being “one of only three Jacobean Plantation Great Houses existing in the Western Hemisphere.” One must not be surprised, therefore, that “the tour consists of the main residence, the immediate gardens and lawns, the terrace and outbuildings (rum and sugar bond) adjacent to the large tree and courtyard, as well as the viewing of the movie” filmed in 1935.Footnote ¹⁴ Sugar production structures outside of the Great House perimeters were not part of the tours in 2007, although some restoration was apparently taking place for future visitors. In this case, I opted for the self-guided tour, although right before me, a group entered the house accompanied by a guide, and I could eavesdrop on what she said to this group during some parts of the tour. The self-guided tour description sheet tells the visitor that one “will be transported back to the elegance and splendor of colonial life on the plantation,” and as I noticed, the guide to the group following us was keen to emphasize such a spirit of time traveling.Footnote ¹⁵ She described how the inside of the house and its furniture “gives you an idea” of “how life really was on the plantation.” It was, she added, “just like it.”Footnote ¹⁶

Of course, that “idea” represents only one side of plantation life, that of the masters, without revealing anything about “how life really was” for the slaves and workers of St. Nicholas Abbey. It is in the edited and preserved film taken by one of the owners in 1935 and shown in the theater as part of the tour that some of the working aspects of the plantation are referred to, but by this time evidently the labor force shown on the plantation was composed of free workers.Footnote ¹⁷ The forced labor that was central for about 180 years of the working life of the plantation was thus effectively silenced. Slavery or slave labor is not mentioned on the tour, and the word “slavery” is not printed a single time in the five-page, single-spaced document provided as a description for the self-guided tour.

The “Great House” at St. Nicholas Abbey in Barbados. Photo by Jorge L. Giovannetti.

The only reference to slavery appears as one walks from the main house, crossing the courtyard in the back of the house and entering into the outbuilding where the theater and rum and sugar bond are located. Inside this structure, there are seven preserved pages of an old document framed on the wall. The document must date at least from the early nineteenth century when the plantation was in the hands of the Cumberbatch family, and before the end of slavery in 1838.Footnote ¹⁸ It is here where slaves appear as part of the exhibition in St. Nicholas Abbey, as a group of men, women, “boys” and “girls” listed with their prices, along with horses, household china, and other property items. While I was looking at this document, I read the names: “Africa,” “Little Africa,” “Pickup,” and “London” are some of the men listed, while “Queen,” “Nanny,” and “Patience,” are among the women, and “Hope” and “Fortune” are two of the children's names. The guided tour that was following me walked by on their way to the theater, but the documents were not explained, and not a single word was said about slavery. The tour guide remained silent on this part of the tour, making for a sharp contrast with all the explanations and enthusiasm inside the main house as the furniture, paintings, and the gentleman's chair (a luxurious item of colonial relaxation) were described.Footnote ¹⁹ Other than the black workers featured in the 1935 film, the only other black figure on St. Nicholas is a small wooden statue, discreetly located at the entrance of the outbuilding, of a man dressed as a servant. The statue holds a tray for visitors to drop coins, perhaps an unspoken statement of class, status, and racial politics of the plantation.Footnote ²⁰

At Puerto Rico's Buena Vista plantation, the tour reaches the Great House at the end of the visit, but only after visitors have walked through the various trails of the plantation and the operational structures. The directed walks are mainly intended to show the innovative system developed by the owner of the plantation in 1840s, Carlos Vives, who used water from the Canas River to power the mills and other machinery in the plantation. Visitors are shown the canals through which the water was diverted from the river to reach a reaction turbine, power the machinery, and then be eventually returned to its source—a requirement of the Spanish colonial government at the time. While the website of Hacienda Buena Vista points out that the plantation achieved one of “its most successful periods” with the “new water system and the manual labor of over fifty slaves that lived and worked” on the plantation,Footnote ²¹ any mention of slavery and slave labor is minimal in the tour itself and depends on the day and tour guide at the time. On one visit, I was told the “story of the slave child who—because of his small size—was assigned the task of cleaning the narrow canals that operated the hydraulic turbine,” but this was not mentioned during a second visit, when the guide only referred to the building where the slave quarters were located without elaborating on their life and culture.Footnote ²² The tour does not enter the slave quarters structure, but does enter the manor house just opposite, which is well-reconstructed and preserved as a “museum and exhibition center.” While no tools or items from the slaves are part of the exhibition, the furniture donated from the Vives family and other items are part of the Great House reconstruction, which refers to the division of rooms and lifestyle of the house.Footnote ²³ Aspects of slavery are mentioned in the award-winning book published by the Conservation Trust of Puerto Rico—the organization in charge of the plantation—but they are not elaborated on during the tour, even though the leading researcher of Hacienda Buena Vista, Guillermo Baralt, is also the author of an important study of slave rebellions in Puerto Rican historiography.Footnote ²⁴

The Great House also holds center stage in the tours of the Brazilian coffee fazendas of Vassouras, Rio de Janeiro, something that is evident in the brochures and promotion materials of the Vale do Café. The main pictures in the brochures I collected are filled almost exclusively with pictures of the different houses, while there are no pictures of the technological equipment of the plantations or the working areas or senzalas (slave quarters). But despite the generalizing hegemony of the iconic Great House, significant differences exist when one compares different plantations within the Paraíba Valley, and of course, when they are compared with those in other countries. To begin, slavery does not seem to be so easily avoidable in the Brazilian context, and at least it was mentioned there more than in the Barbadian and Puerto Rican experiences. Two plantations selected to be analyzed here differ in a way that I believe has a significant impact on the historical narratives of the plantation. The Fazenda Cachoeira do Mato Dentro has remained in the hands of the descendant of the original owners since the immediate post-emancipation era (1890s), and Fazenda Cachoeira Grande was in ruins and acquired and restored in the 1990s by new owners who made it their residence and also opened its doors to local and international tourism. This distinction in ownership is significant in a number of ways that will become evident.

In Cachoeira Grande, I experienced a contemporary version of the territorial control of the nineteenth-century plantations through the multiple security measures to gain access to the plantation site—a “segurança de madre” (the mother of all securities), our driver said, as we waited at the intercom for one of the gates to be opened by a black barefoot cross-eyed child that looked at us intensely as we drove in (perhaps a Kongo curse?). We joined a tour of some forty-five to fifty persons who arrived on a large bus, and we were entertained by the owner of the plantation (a white upper-class Brazilian woman) as we waited for the historian who serves as guide to the site (an afrodescendente local teacher). Upon the teacher's arrival, the tour started walking slowly across the front garden toward the Great House, enjoying the scenery from the Great House perspective. “We were shown the ‘panoptical’ view of the fazenda,” I noted in my journal, “from where you could see the entrance, the ‘lavoura,’ … the working area” where rice was produced at some point. As the guide showed us the view, she mentioned the phrase “embaixo dos olhos do patrão—under the eyes of the boss,” or master, indicating the way in which labor processes could always be under surveillance.Footnote ²⁵ This was one of the brief moments in which a reference to slave labor was made on the tour, an acknowledgement that the site once had slaves and now had “collaborators.” The guide also noted apologetically that the senzalas had been turned into apartment rooms due to an initial lack of awareness of their importance to the plantation's history.Footnote ²⁶

The importance of the Great House, on the other hand, had obviously not been forgotten, and it was inside of it that we entered in two groups of approximately twenty-five persons each, one group being guided by the owner and the second by the teacher/guide. I wrote: “The house inside was all furnished as an exhibition with pictures, pianos, and all t[y]pes of chairs, etc. The owner […] and her aunt played the piano in the different rooms. There were, at least, three of them [pianos]. The house had a chapel inside with an organ.”Footnote ²⁷ We were shown all the principal living rooms of the house, including the main dining room with its long table seating at least eighteen persons. This room is renowned for being the place in which the daughter of the plantation owner once entertained Princess Isabel, the member of the Brazilian royal family who signed the abolition of slavery law (although this latter fact was not mentioned). Up to this point in the tour, the main narrative of the plantation is one that speaks either of the many windows of the house and of its restoration process with luxurious antique items, inviting visitors to go back to “the nineteenth century, to the elegant scenery of a history lived on an authentic plantation of the Coffee Cycle.”Footnote ²⁸ This time-travel narrative—similar to the one in Barbados—includes not only aspects of that nineteenth-century history and the daily life of planters that visitors are expected to experience, but also the history of the current owners, which somehow becomes inserted in the tour by constant references to the acquisition of the plantation, the four years it took them to restore it, the personal travails involved in the process, and the investment of time and effort in getting the appropriate furniture and appliances.Footnote ²⁹ This master's narrative became somehow disrupted in the kitchen. The group with the owner was told that there was a set of individual cutlery stored in separate shelves for each day of the week, but when this group proceeded to the final room, I deserted to the other group (the one with the teacher) that was lagging behind. When this second group reached the kitchen, the story was not about the cutlery, but about the slave revolt of 1838 in which Manuel Congo and Maria Crioula participated. As it turns out, while the white owner provided a master's narrative, the afrodescendente history teacher provided a different kind of story—a subversive one, if one likes.Footnote ³⁰ The tour officially finished in a livingroom that has an exit to the gardens, and refreshments were offered to the visitors in the open air, but we were never shown the senzala apartment rooms, which were some meters away, locked and silent.

While not escaping the master's narrative of the Great House, in Cachoeira do Mato Dentro the experience was different in a number of ways. To begin with, the plantation has remained in the hands of the same owners since the late nineteenth century, and its owner Luiz Felipe Rangel has collected memories of stories told to him by former slaves and descendants of slaves—while also nourishing his knowledge through conversations with historians who have visited the place. He was very honest in pointing out at once that he is not a historian—although his wife is—and he also called into question many of the memories he himself narrates. These stories, he said, have to be “divided by two” because they are stories that one person told to another person, who in turn told them to a third person.Footnote ³¹ In this case, the tour was not for a large group of visitors, but a more exclusive one (for three persons including the driver), and thus it was a more conversational, spontaneous, and relaxed experience. Really located in the Mato Dentro, (deep hinterlands) we had a long drive to actually get to the site. At our arrival, Dom Luiz walked out of the house taking us towards the front gates of the house near the front staircase, where he paused and started the tour with a long conversation in which he spoke about issues of slavery. About it, I wrote:

We moved into the house, and then the tour entered into the Great House narrative, examining each and every room and hearing stories about the different artifacts, which in this case included many documents from the plantation that are kept in the house library. The only room within the house where slavery was discussed was in the infirmary, which has an underground tunnel that comes from the basement. “Slaves who would receive treatment would have to come via that tunnel rather than actually entering the house through the main entrance.”Footnote ³³ Once outside of the house, the tour of the Cachoeira do Mato Dentro tour included aspects of slave life and labor; the banheiro (bathroom) belonging to the slaves, and original working artifacts and machinery of the plantation that are kept in a dark basement where we saw bats flying from side to side during our visit. The senzalas, meters away from the Great House—as in Cachoeira Grande—were not part of the tour, although they were mentioned.

Comparing the two Brazilian plantations provides an opportunity to consider how the nature of ownership affects the public narrative of the plantation. New owners in Cachoeira Grande were more focused on the nostalgic idea of seignorial nineteenth-century Brazilian life, and needed to recruit a (subversive?) historian to provide historical context to the tour that could go beyond their own story of the acquisition of the property. Dom Luiz, on the other hand, as someone who was born on the plantation itself, acts as a self-sufficient story-teller who speaks about slavery and the plantation world not as something acquired to be developed into a tourist attraction, but as something that is very much a part of his life. I wrote that Dom Luiz “is as of today[,] a fazendeiro in the most genuine sense of the word, with all his employees working for him (about a dozen of them),” including one of some seventy-odd years who is now “aposentada” (retired) but still living there in the house. The sense of “speaking with someone whose world has not change[d] that much, or someone so linked to that past history, was something that struck” us during our visit. Our driver described Cachoeira Grande as an “espetáculo,” while I described Cachoeira do Mato Dentro in my journal more as a “museum and archive,” due to the work equipment in exhibition and the documents kept by Dom Luiz.Footnote ³⁴ In each, the tour is centered on the Great House, and while slavery appears in each of them to different degrees (more in Mato Dentro than in Cachoeira Grande), no mention is made of the fact that it was a slave economy that made all that nineteenth-century Great House lifestyle possible. As Stanley Stein quoted from Louis Couty: “On the plantation … everything or almost everything is the product of the Black man: it is he who has built the houses; he has made the bricks, sawed the boards, channeled the water, etc.; the roads and most of the machines in the engenho are, along with the land cultivated, the products of his industry.”Footnote ³⁵

Brochure materials from Vassouras do refer to slavery directly or indirectly by mentioning that Cachoeira Grande was an important producer of cachaça, “an activity that survived abolition,” (the word slavery is not written) and in Mato Dentro's description referring to the attractions of the “bathroom of stones belonging to the slaves” and the “senzalas”—the latter not shown to us.Footnote ³⁶ In the case of another plantation (Fazenda do Secretário), a promotional poster notes that it “chegou a possuir 500.000 pés de café e 366 escravos.”Footnote ³⁷ But in general, the promotional iconography of the “Fazendas Históricas de Vassouras” shows exclusively the photographs of the Great Houses, highlighting historical ownership—whether it was owned by this or that baron—or some production aspects, but without referring to the role of enslaved labor. Cultural activities in Vassouras include the yearly event of “Música na Fazenda,” (Music in the Plantation) and while I did not visit the city during the event, the brochure notes the performance of “Camerata do Pim—música clássica,” and “Voz e violão.”Footnote ³⁸ No Afro-Brazilian jongos appear to be performed in the event, and I could not help wondering if any mention will be made of stories such as that of fazendeiro José Breves who in 1857 “had a band of musicians composed entirely of blacks & all except two of them genuine Africans.”Footnote ³⁹

Back in the Caribbean, the case of La Dionisia plantation in Cuba is somehow similar to the Mato Dentro in Brazil in that the guide, Don Nemesio, was—like Dom Luiz Felipe Rangel—born on the plantation (in 1928) and has lived there all his life. Like his Brazilian counterpart, some of Don Nemesio's memories of life in the plantation come from “what was told to him by one of the sons of Susana [Girado, a freed slave] and also by one old slave who lived more than one hundred years.”Footnote ⁴⁰ While La Dionisia receives organized tours, our visit was coordinated by a colleague, Bárbara Danzie, involved in the Slave Route Project in Cuba and by the local historian of Matanzas, Urbano Martínez. Therefore, the tour was like in Mato Dentro, exclusively for us. We arrived, entered the premises of the plantation through the main gate, and came across Don Nemesio at the front gates of the house. A “short man with a very intense look and watery eyes,” he interrupted his work activities and immediately started to show us the plantation site.Footnote ⁴¹ Context in this case becomes somehow more relevant than in previous ones for the purposes of analysis. Neither a privately-owned plantation site (as in Barbados or Brazil), nor one run by a non-profit organization (as in Puerto Rico), these plantation lands passed to the hands of the Cuban State after the triumph of the Revolution in 1959, but Don Nemesio has continued living in the house where he was born and has thus become the de facto tour guide of the plantation. For all practical purposes, it gave me the impression that he lives the life of an average Cuban farmer, with communication problems (no phone—a cause of vigorous complaint), no modern bathroom facilities, and certainly without the luxuries and continuing power relationship to labor of the Brazilian fazendeiros or the resources of St. Nicholas in Barbados and Buena Vista in Puerto Rico.

According to our host, La Dionisia was originally founded by a French émigré from St. Domingue during the Haitian Revolution, who went to Louisiana in 1801 and then settled in Cuba.Footnote ⁴² The plantation then changed hands and acquired its name from the mother of one of its owners, Francisco Simón Rubier.Footnote ⁴³ Don Nemesio's account tells us that the slave population of the plantation was about 160 and that it was composed of more women than men because the former served both for coffee collection and reproduction of the slave community.Footnote ⁴⁴ The visit to La Dionisia was different from the others in one fundamental aspect: The plantation house did not enjoy center stage in the tour, but it was left for the end (as in Puerto Rico's Buena Vista), prioritizing the working structures and aspects of the plantation. La Dionisia is also distinct from the other plantations examined here, except Mato Dentro, in that slavery and aspects of slave life were prominent and central in the public narrative presented. Starting in front of the main house (where we met Don Nemesio), we made a tour moving counter-clockwise from the house (12:00), starting at the well (at 9:00), passing close to the plantation's main gate (at 6:00), towards the Ceiba Tree, then walking past the ruins of the coffee storage building (4:00), and then moving to the ruins of the quarters of “forced coupling” of the slaves (2:00), back to the main house and then inside it (12:00), starting over again counterclockwise, culminating in the location of the plantation's bell tower and the “criadero de criollitos” (nursery for slave children) (at 10:00), just before the well where we started.

While showing us the operation of the well with a donkey, Don Nemesio mentioned to us that it was constructed by slaves.Footnote ⁴⁵ We then moved to the Ceiba tree, where he described its role as a sacred place for the beliefs of slaves, and mentioned the fact that it was at that tree where some slaves preferred to commit suicide.Footnote ⁴⁶ Before moving to the ruins of the coffee storage building, we were told that in the 1980s the slave quarters were destroyed “for no reason” by construction equipment of the government because the building was in the way of an electric line that was being installed. Walking toward the ruins we passed a group of coffee trees to our right, which had been planted because visitors constantly asked where the coffee was! Standing at the back of the ruins, we moved inside and across the ruins of the coffee storage building, which had no doors, exiting via the main entrance. In front of the storage building there is a rack of what a fellow visitor described as the most “amazing collection of manacles I've ever seen.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Don Nemesio made a stop to describe each of the items, those used on the legs, necks and wrists of the enslaved; I experienced the weight of one of them on my wrist, while others in the group took hold of the heavy iron (the household item for ironing, that is) that must have been used by domestic slaves. We were told that the shackles were used only for captured maroons, and that they were not generally used on slaves within the plantation.

The next stop were the ruins of what was described to us as the “rooms for forced coupling,” which Don Nemesio had mentioned earlier in the tour. This structure (or what was left of it) consisted of a set of rooms which could only be locked from the outside: “the master would bring a strong slave, take him to the room where a slave woman would be [locked in], open the door, [and] say: “Ahí te dejo un negro” [“Here I am leaving you this black man] and lock the door.”Footnote ⁴⁸ I have never read or heard of the existence of a structure for this expressed purpose on any plantation in Cuba or elsewhere.Footnote ⁴⁹ As in the case of the Mato Dentro plantation, where the narrative presented the concerns regarding the slave population in the context of the abolition of the slave trade, mentioning the role of a strong male slave as breeder, Don Nemesio would elaborate on the way in which male and female slaves were selected for breeding new strong slaves, which “would be good for work & sale.” A prevalent narrative was maintained throughout the tour considering issues of “supply, survival, and maint[e]nance of a slave labor force” which included the “forced coupling rooms” we were standing in, but also the “criadero de criollitos,” which was located at the other extreme of the plantation.Footnote ⁵⁰ In the tour's narrative, the end of the legal slave trade and the subsequent effect on slave prices (up to two thousand pesos, according to Don Nemesio) were mentioned as rationales behind the “forced coupling,” the “criadero,” and the gender demographics of the plantation (more women than men). One could raise questions about these latter aspects of the tour's narrative, but that would be beyond the scope of this essay. However, suffice it to say that slave prices in Cuba were not commonly as high as the price mentioned by Don Nemesio and also that the large clandestine slave trade to Cuba may have made some of the described plantation policies and practices with regard to the slave population unnecessary.Footnote ⁵¹

Remains of rack and manacles at La Dionisia plantation in Cuba. Photo by Jorge L. Giovannetti.

We proceded inside the main house of the plantation, not to hear stories of the lifestyle of the wealthy planters, or a master's narrative of luxury on the plantation, but more stories about slavery—a significant contrast with the other sites in Barbados, Brazil, and Puerto Rico. There, inside one of the rooms of the house, Don Nemesio had no reservations about telling us how Francisco Simón Rubier had “amores con las esclavas,” (sexual relations with female slaves), then moving to other stories about the strategic ways in which money was transferred from the plantation to the city—using a slave who would be unaware that he was carrying the money.Footnote ⁵² He also showed us the oven area, which was basically destroyed, and the rooms of the domestic slaves, also in ruins and located in the back of the main house. Don Nemesio mentioned that bread was made for the slaves in that oven, certainly a contrast with the kitchen stories of the owner of Cachoeira Grande, dominated by the story of the set of crockery for every day of the week and the “grande jantar” (great dinner) offered to Princess Isabel and Conde D'Eu in 1884. In La Dionisia, the master's narrative of the Great House is thus radically altered in a variety of ways that contrast with other sites. We exited the house through the back yard, near a restaurant, and moved outside to the gardens of the house to finally reach the criadero and the area where the plantation bell tower was located. On this Cuban plantation, therefore, the time spent in the main plantation house is significantly less than in other cases—not to mention the already evident difference in the narrative presented to the public.

The criadero consisted of a large area surrounded by stone walls and used for slave children. There, we were also near the plantation bell tower, where Don Nemesio made the connection between the bread cooked in the house kitchen and the way it was used to feed the slaves that were gathered together near the bell tower. Here, the slaves would also be assigned the different tasks to be performed on the plantation. Don Nemesio complained that the original bell tower had been destroyed, in the same way he had complained of the destruction of the slave quarters before.

Final Thoughts

Discussions and debates about slavery in the Americas have always been linked not only to historical interpretations of the past, but to contemporary issues of race and politics in different countries. It may seem ironic that for all the strident calls for reparations for slavery and the slave trade from Barbados' leading intellectuals, the Barbadian plantation site examined here was among those that paid no attention to slavery.Footnote ⁵³ Conversely, it seems paradoxical (or perhaps significant) that, of those visited, a Cuban plantation site should be the most open and explicit about slavery, given the relatively long silence about race on the island, the deteriorated state of race relations, and the virulent and open racism that one can find in daily life in Cuba.Footnote ⁵⁴ In the middle, one finds the cases of Puerto Rico, where heritage sites are diligently taken care of,Footnote ⁵⁵ but where slavery's brutal legacy is often silenced and a public and informed discussion about race relations and racism is very limited.Footnote ⁵⁶ One feels tempted to recast the old debate of Iberian versus Northwest European colonial traditions of enslavement in a new setting, and indeed the different colonial histories and socio-cultural contexts elicit fascinating comparisons. Yet, it is evident from the small sample presented here that the contemporary reality is all too complex to be framed in such terms; the greater silence in Barbados does not stem from the harsh slave regime that once existed there, nor does the openness regarding slavery in La Dionisia and Mato Dentro confirm the alleged mild regime of Cuba and Brazil (even if such discourse is reproduced). While the study of the different public representations of slavery should keep those debates on the horizon, their analysis demands a new theoretical and conceptual apparatus and an acknowledgment of the politics of power, inequality and contestation in the present.

In Brazil, the emergence of plantation tourism has coincided with the consolidation of political struggles and visibility of movements of racial uplift and government policies for the improvement of race relations, thus making the evasion of slavery more difficult. Yet, while at the local level in Vassouras a certain historical memory of slavery is evidenced in the erection of a Memorial to Manuel Congo in 1996,Footnote ⁵⁷ in the plantations that are independently run as business enterprises, discussions of slavery, although present, seem to be overshadowed by a hegemonic master's narrative centered on the Great House—that is, unless you recruit a subversive tour guide! In Barbados, similarly, the plantation examined with its commemoration of the lifestyle of planters and its silence of slavery, seems to be detached from the persistent social, racial, and economic inequalities of the island and the politics of contestation that were revealed over other sites where slavery is publicly represented (such as “The Bussa Statue,” and the Barbados Museum and Historical Society).Footnote ⁵⁸ The plantation seems to remain as a closed place where power is still exercised by owners independently of the outer world—this time, over the production of history.

The experience in the countries examined here indicates that the administrator, owner of the plantation heritage site, or tour guide (subversive or not) can make a significant difference to the public representation of slavery. Whenever the person had some kind of training in history or personal link to the site (such as that of Dom Luiz in Brazil and Don Nemesio in Cuba), the subject of slavery would emerge as part of the tour—not in unproblematic ways, of course. Where the tour was offered in a more institutionalized and organized business-oriented way (as in Barbados and Puerto Rico) and with heritage industry employees (without history training as a requisite) or persons without a historical link to the site (as in the case of the owner of Cachoeira Grande), slavery was silenced or referred to in very limited ways. The fact that St. Nicholas and Buena Vista are, by now, plantation sites operating as businesses devoted to and experienced in receiving tourists means that employees can come and go, possibly repeating a historical script on the plantation again and again—a script that silences slavery. In Cuba, the script of Don Nemesio seems to be a repetitive one as well for all visitors, but his life experience and historical link to the plantation makes a significant difference to the insertion of slavery into his narrative.Footnote ⁵⁹ A similar historical link is experienced in Mato Dentro with Dom Luiz, but while he addresses issues of slavery and slave labor openly, he is less able to avoid the master's narrative that is centered in the Great House and its contents—something that may also be, precisely, due to his particular life experience on the plantation. The new, white, upper-class owner of Cachoeira Grande, with no links to the history of the plantation, virtually did not refer to slavery, while the Afro-Brazilian teacher recruited as a guide did.

Other Caribbean plantation sites not examined here indicate how the guide's background and the organization of the tour in the plantation site can affect the degree to which slavery is treated in public history sites. In Bois Cotlette plantation in Dominica, during a 2003 visit, the role of local historian Lennox Honychurch as a guide guaranteed a balanced tour in which slavery was not forgotten. The ruins of Bois Cotlette, located in the south of the island (Parish of St. Mark) are in the hands of the original owners, and while the site could easily lend itself to a master's narrative, Honychurch's historical research allows him to indicate the site of the slave huts as part of the tour—even in the absence of ruins. The tour also covers the operational aspects of the plantation (the maison, the windmill, coffee pulping mill, and coffee house) nourished by Honychurch's knowledge.Footnote ⁶⁰ In another Buenavista coffee plantation (this one in Cuba), belonging to the larger tourist complex of Las Terrazas, in Pinar del Río, the site does not have an official tour guide or a team of guides. No brochures were provided during my 2008 visit, and visitors arrived with tour guides from the complex, in a hurry as they were trying to cover all the amenities of Las Terrazas—including a river, hotel facilities, etc. The tour operates as a mechanical stopping at key points (the “seignorial house” and bell, storage rooms, slave quarters, coffee drying platforms, and the “horno de cal”). Knowledge about slavery seems to be up to the arbitrary criteria of the many guides I saw coming in and out, providing only general statements about the location of the slave barracks, the conditions of enslavement, and the life expectancy of the captives—some of which seemed dubious to me and my historian colleagues.Footnote ⁶¹

In short, it could be stated that even in the absence of material structures, informed guides and administrators who take a proactive role can assist in incorporating a public history of slavery into plantation sites. The general failure to incorporate slave barracks or senzalas in plantation tours also misses an opportunity to deal with issues of slavery, and it has been argued for the United States that such inclusion contributes to the better interpretation of plantation slavery.Footnote ⁶² Highlighting the history of slavery on plantation sites seems to be the most obvious thing to do, given that it was the labor of thousands of slaves that made such sites possible, including the luxury and glamour of Great Houses. The fact that these Great House structures were able to survive the effects of time (in contrast with slave huts and barracks) should not be a reason for us to forget the history of those who worked on those sites, were a numerical majority on most plantations, and made the Great House possible in the first place. An accurate representation of plantation history must take into account the enslaved, even if the structures that testify to their presence have disappeared with time or have been neglected in the historical reconstruction of plantation sites—both indications of the unequal relations of power at different times in history.Footnote ⁶³ Moreover, it is a moral imperative to speak of, and represent, the relations of power and socio-racial inequality that ruled in plantation society, in order to understand the unequal racial relations in the Americas today. Those in charge of the heritage industry must be aware of this responsibility, partly because of the huge impact they have—or can potentially have—on people's knowledge.Footnote ⁶⁴

In Andrea Levy's novel, Fruit of the Lemon, Faith Jackson—the main character—takes us on her journey from England to Jamaica where her parents were born. Because “everyone should know where they come from”—as her mother said—she makes a journey to meet her Jamaican family, and with them, her ancestors, her story. On her final day on the Caribbean island, Faith summarizes her stay in Jamaica and tells us about the trip she made to the Blue Mountains with her cousin Vincent, his wife Gloria, and their children, Amber and Jonathan. In the Jamaican highlands, they entered the premises of a house overlooking Kingston, a house they could not go into. It had windows “elegantly glazed with squares of glass like fine Georgian houses in England,” and looking through them, they saw “Family pictures on a brown wooden table. Sofas, chairs, bookshelves and cabinets that could be antiques.” “But,” Faith tells us, “what Vincent had wanted me to see was around at the back of the house.” “It was a shed,” an “unprotected place,” to which they walked. “Slave quarters,” Vincent told her.

Two aspects of this episode of the novel seem to me relevant to what has been presented in this essay and the dilemmas of plantation heritage tourism. The first is Gloria's question of who would want to preserve “a thing like that,” slave quarters. Second, is the assertion and question that summons Amber and Jonathan inside this “shed.” Why is it that we don't want to “look”? Is there something to fear? There were no slaves inside the shed, because slavery had ended long ago (and with it, the quarters would have also fallen “long ago,” supposedly). But were the slaves somewhere else, in Amber and Jonathan's mind? Perhaps despite their age, they knew something about slavery, and seemed to fear it.

In the context of public narratives of slavery, Levy's story compels us to think about a very basic question: Why do we want to preserve the ruins which remind us of our slave past? One answer is in Faith's story itself. In her last day she collects the memories she is taking back to England, but she also takes with her a bag of red coffee berries from the former coffee plantation where she saw the slave quarters. She may have also taken something else that would help her understand the racial politics of daily life she had begun to face in England. Maybe, like the Akan idea of Sankofa, Faith took something from her “past” in order to make good use of it in the present. In many ways, the preservation of the plantations where enslaved Africans and their descendants worked in the past, and the transformation of them into sites for the public history of slavery, can also fulfill a good function in the present. Our learning about the Great Houses, their luxurious items and furniture, could be accompanied by learning about the hard labor that made the Great House and its luxuries possible. We could learn about the resilience of the enslaved people who endured the painful institution of slavery, their strategies of survival, their social and cultural creativity under life conditions that were precarious and horrible, and the intelligence that led them to challenge the system of oppression under which they lived. Plantations today could be sites of learning that could be wisely and intelligently used to teach racial pride in the present world in which non-whites still endure racial discrimination.

Another kind of answer to the question raised above is that of the existent fears which the passage in Levy's novel touches. What are those fears? What are we afraid to “look” at when we travel to that past? Are we afraid to look at the pain that our ancestors inflicted on others, or that was inflicted on our ancestors by others? Do we fear the dehumanization and the inhumanities that prevailed under slavery? Do we fear seeing it, or do we fear showing it? Is there embarrassment on the part of those with the power to create and control public history sites? Is that the reason why they prefer to uphold the master's narrative of the plantation? There should be no fear, I propose, of subverting the master's narrative and representing slavery for what it was, of speaking of slavery in all its complexity, and all its revolting aspects. Such public representation of our slave past is the massive responsibility of both those involved in portraying slavery and also, in many ways, those consuming such representations.Footnote ⁶⁶ It is not an easy task to make something good in our present out of something so horribly wrong in our past, but it is imperative for us to do so.