Pepito’s great grandfather, Salvador, loathed farming, sugar or otherwise. Although directly responsible for his abundant financial existence, he saw the sugar plantations and their difficulties with alarming humor, never quite controlling his laughter when told tales of the Indians and their chicanery. He often said, “It is the Indians who brought the Africans to the Americas, if they had controlled themselves, a need for an alternative worker would never have materialized.” Slavery was a heavy money industry. Tribal leaders often fed their entire tribe for a year or more on what they made kidnapping a rival tribe. The wild blood of Native Islanders and their distaste for manual labor that wasnt hunting, farming, or fishing, made them difficult to train and rely on, particularly ill-suited for businesses where production has to be stable to assure a profit. In the Caribbean, a single island does not exist where the Indian was permanently tamed. Their chief problem was their willingness to flee regardless of how well fed and clothed their benefactors kept them. They easily hid out for days, weeks, and even months in the mountains and countryside, they knew so well. Rumor has it that Cuba’s Taino Indian was the most passive of the West Indies, but as unreliable as all the others. As a direct result, a black man fetched a slave broker five to twenty-five times what a native Indian would. Pepito’s paternal great-great-great grandfather was a man of vision, an executive whose business was related to the sea, and whose eyesight to anything where there was something of value to be made, he preferred money. He saw slavery strictly as a business, an opportunity available to anyone with enough capital to take the risks. He took the risks, ferrying Negroes from Africa’s southern tip to the natural harbors of Cuba, where the auctioneers sold the human products to the highest bidders. Eduardo Perez de Dumois charged lucrative shipping fees. Pepitos Baseballs, Fidels Hunger, & Avocados by Rene Abril Link: amzn/B00FGD492Q
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 23:37:15 +0000
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