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AP
HAVANA
An AMERICAN team of academics is racing to preserve millions of Cuban historical documents before they are lost to the elements and poor storage conditions.
Many of the documents shed light on the slave trade, an integral part of Cuba's colonial history that was intertwined with that of the United States.
David Lafevor, a history professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, and his brother Matthew, a geography professor at the University of Alabama, have worked since 2005 to make computer copies of millions of documents mouldering in damp storage spaces on the island.
Their latest project is a partnership between the British Library Foundation and Vanderbilt University to capture almost 2 million documents in digital form, a treasure trove stretching back to the mid-16th century of documents about early island life and the slave trade.
David Lafevor said there is nothing like Cuba's documents in the US, where slaves were considered possessions, not human beings.
Though no less ruthless when it came to slavery than the Anglos to the north, the Spanish recognised the 'personhood' of slaves once they were baptised into the Catholic Church. Their births, marital status, national origin and deaths were all duly recorded in the town records and stored in church archives, leaving a historical record of blacks and the lives they led unique in the Americas.
Churches became the repository of much of this history because of its central role in island life and because church officials were painstaking documentarians who often were the most educated in their communities, David Lafevor said.
"The documents are not only pertinent to the Catholic Church because the church was often the most substantial building in town, so other documents were kept there as well," he said.
