Guantanamo

Around Guantánamo, the upheavals in Saint-Domingue reshaped the mountains of eastern Cuba. From the 1790s, French plantation owners fleeing the revolution crossed to Spanish Cuba with enslaved Africans. They received land in the southeastern foothills and established coffee estates east and west of Guantánamo and Santiago. Their agricultural expansion rested on the forced labour of the people they enslaved.

The early nineteenth-century estates combined owners' houses, workers' quarters, terraced drying floors and processing buildings. Wet pulping required cisterns and aqueducts, while mountain roads and bridges connected the plantations with export outlets. Coffee production thus altered both the cultivated slopes and the routes through them. These estates formed part of a distinctive regional society shaped by migration from Saint-Domingue, French and Haitian practices, and African labour and cultural traditions.