Unlike Southern planters in the United States, Cuba’s “sugarocratic” elite of the eighteenth and nineteenth century considered living too close to the source of their wealth—that is, the daily violence reaped on slaves in sugar plantations—was demeaning. The German-Cuban Brunet family of Trinidad, a sixteenth-century colonial town in the Central Valley of the Sugar Mills, proved exceptional in this regard. Built-in the 1830s when Cuba’s slave-fueled sugar boom was taking off, the opulence of the Brunet manor house overlooking vast sugar cane fields rivaled its urban counterpart in town. When I visited in the late 1990s, the government had only recently forced the squatters who had occupied it to leave in the hopes of transforming it into a tourist site. Italian frescoes, commissioned by the original slave master Brunet (whom locals continued to call “el Viejo Brunet” as if he had just died), kept vigil over hauntingly quiet rooms. Soviet-era blue house paint peeled back from the wall over the main door, revealed other, still vibrant décor below. The house was also rumored to have included a hidden chamber decorated with the faces of demons where Brunet terrorized young male house slaves in confinement. Everyone agreed that this secret room had never been found because, legend had it, when Brunet died, his spirit entered the chamber, and God’s Angels drove it straight to Hell. Trinidad de Cuba, July 2001.
