One of the most disturbing exhibits in the Bacardí Museum of Santiago de Cuba features different instruments for brutalizing enslaved workers. Along with the everyday whip used by managers of field slaves to keep them working, the display includes an iron collarcío [necklace] equipped with hooks from which to hang all variety of heavy weights that threatened to break one’s neck. Another object seen hanging is made from manatee hide, considered the hardest leather in the world. Someone has written on the strip above its handle: con lo que se castiga a los negros [with what Blacks are punished]. Behind it hangs a long baton with a leather bracelet so that it would not slip from the user’s wrist while engaged in torturing the enslaved. It is labeled simply by the term used during slaver: matanegros [killer of Blacks]. Santiago de Cuba, July 2016.
