Established in the first two decades after the Spanish arrival in the New World, Trinidad de Cuba is an ancient jewel. Its every facet mirrors both the unimaginable human pain of hundreds of thousands of slaves who were worked to death to produce sugar as well as the magnificent wealth their pain generated for slave-owning planters, slave traders and Spain. Trinidad’s streets are paved in the ballast of ships (made of volcanic stones called adoquines). Coming into port, they would empty their holds and refill them with tons of sugar destined for markets in Europe and by the 1820s, mostly in the United States. Local people say that every stone in the road is the tear of a slave. Here and all over Cuba, slaves, free people of color and their allies had a common saying throughout the Nineteenth Century: Sugar is made with blood. (Photographs by Matt Joseph Pessar, Ph.D.)
