Southern Cuban villages record the first years of living with Spaniards

The communities of central and southern Cuba worked a coastline and an interior that differ sharply from one another, and they arranged their settlements to draw on both. Lourdes Dominguez identified a series of these sites and found in them something more than a record of the centuries before contact. The deposits hold traditional shell tools lying alongside ceramics of early colonial manufacture, the two together in the same ground. That mixture is the opening phase of what gets called transculturation, the process by which two populations alter one another. It is also evidence of survival. People whose world was being taken apart went on making the tools they had always made and took up what the newcomers brought, because that is what a household does when the terms of life change. Variation between one part of the Caribbean and another is easy to flatten into a single indigenous story. The southern shore of Cuba does not fit it.

Alvise da Cadamosto, a Venetian working for the Portuguese, sailed to Senegambia in 1455 and opened his first negotiation with Budomel, a Jalof lord who promised captives in exchange for horses. To show good faith Budomel handed over a girl of about twelve. Cadamosto wrote that she was given for the service of his chamber, that he accepted her, and that he sent her to the ship. He recorded no objection to any part of the transaction and said nothing further about her. What she understood of it, and what the women and girls left behind under Budomel understood, went unwritten, though the terms would have been plain enough to all of them. Cadamosto came back to the Gambia river in 1456. His narrative was printed in Italian in 1507 and translated into Latin, German and French within eight years, which made it one of the first accounts through which European readers learned that people on that coast could be bought.

On 5 December 1492 Columbus brought his ships to the north coast of the island and named it La Isla Espanola, the Spanish island. Philippe Girard begins his history of Haiti at this point. What the Spanish found was a worked landscape. The island supported a large population living in villages under chiefs, growing cassava, sweet potato and maize in raised mounds, fishing the reefs, playing a ball game on prepared courts, and moving between islands in large canoes. Within fifty years almost all of it was gone. The naming is the part to notice. On the first day of contact the island acquired a Spanish identity in Spanish records, and the words its inhabitants used for it went into the archive as curiosities. Everything the Spanish did afterward followed from the assumption buried in that name. The country that eventually threw them and their French successors out chose to call itself Ayiti, a word taken from the people who were there first.

After weeks out of the Canaries the ships made land on 12 October 1492 at an island in the Bahamian archipelago. The people living there called it Guanahani. Columbus went ashore with a notary and a royal standard, performed the ceremony of possession in the name of Ferdinand and Isabella, and gave the island a new name, San Salvador. Nobody on the Taino side had any way of knowing what the ritual meant, and the document it produced was written in a language none of them read. Which island in the Bahamas this was remains argued over, since several candidates fit the sailing directions in the log. The naming matters more than the location. The first act of the encounter was the replacement of a local name with a Spanish one, backed by a legal formula devised in Europe to turn land already occupied by other people into crown property. That formula was applied to Hispaniola eight weeks later.