Jose Barreiro, Professor
Cornell University, Ithaca

A planning meeting for the Indigenous Legacies of the Caribbean Conference, taking place November 16 to 23 in Baracoa, Cuba, was held here in early 1997. Delegates included Taino descendants and other peoples of Native ancestry from Puerto Rico, the United States and Canada, representatives of the Taino Nation of the Antilles (which has bases in Puerto Rico (Boriken) and the U.S.) and scholars from Cuba, other countries in the Caribbean, Canada and the United States.

The local Taino cultural group in Baracoa shared dances and performed other typical Cuban country music, while scholars analyzed the influence of Taino culture on the agriculture and language of the islands.

Manuel Rivero de la Calle, dean of Cuban anthropology, was a featured speaker at the meeting. Rivero de la Calle carried out a decade°long study of the guajiros in the Baracoa to Guantēnamo mountain ranges. Later published in Cuban journals, the study identified some one thousand people of indigenous descent and identity in the vicinity of Caridad de los Indios, near Yateras, a district of Guantēnamo province.

Panchito Ramirez Ramirez, the current cacique of Caridad, also attended the planning meeting, along with several other members of his community. Cacique Ramirez spoke at length about the use of herbal medicines in his mountain cacerio. The cacique demonstrated the offerings and prayers made in the picking and gathering of plant medicines, the lore around the use of "lighting stones," the intonation of "the four directions" and a great deal of oral history of his family and his community. He and his sons and daughter also demonstrated songs and dances learned from his grandparents.

"Cubans and other Caribbean people need to recognize extensive uses that our campesinos, particularly our guajiros of this part of the country, make of old Taino ways. The national transculturation here draws a lot on indigenous natural knowledge," Rivero de la Calle stated.

Cuban geographer Antonio Nu§ez Jimenez reported encounters with Cuban Indians of the eastern mountains in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It was in the 1970s, however, that the concentrated work of Dr. Manuel Rivero de la Calle with the community at Caridad de los Indios brought out a number of scientific and journalistic accounts of the survival of Indians in the region. By the 1980s, small articles began to appear in Cuban newspapers and magazines such as Granma, Juventud Rebelde and Bohemia reporting on the work of these researchers.

From Cuba, cacique Ramirez spoke for himself. "We are Cubans but we are also Indians, Taino Indians," he said. "We have an obligation to practice our culture. And what we say to other Cubans is this: our natural Cuba is beautiful. This land is a mother who blesses us and can feed us forever, if we take care of her and help her nurture us."

Excerpts from an article that appeared in Native Americas Magazine, Vol. 14, No. 1, Spring, 1997.