Esteban Mesa Montejo Part 2
Courtesy of the New York Public Library
Esteban Mesa Montejo (1860-1973) was born a slave in Cuba in 1860. He escaped from his master and lived as a runaway. Cuban ethnologist Miguel Barnet conducted and recorded interviews with him in 1963 and then edited and organized them into a slave narrative entitled The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave first published in 1966. Montejeo lived alone in the woods as a runaway for several years until he learned that slavery had been abolished in Cuba in 1886. His narrative provides an interesting contrast to the slave narratives described Douglass’ and Northup’s accounts. In addition, Montejo details interesting descriptions of the herbal remedies enslaved people used in nineteenth-century Cuba. His account describes how enslaved people in Cuba employed numerous tactics to eat while their owners, in most instances, provided them with scanty amounts of food rations. Cutting the rations allocated to slaves, especially in the sugar-producing regions of the Caribbean represented a common strategy masters took to reduce their expenses. Esteban Montejo says, small gardens kept many enslaved folks from starving. They grew “sweet potatoes, squash, okra, corn, peas, horse beans, beans like limas, limes, yuca and peanuts.”
