Ciboney Erotic

The Ciboney were a people of Cuba and southwestern Hispaniola who ceased to exist as distinct communities within roughly fifty years of Spanish contact in 1492, undone by introduced disease, forced labor and violence. Their ancestry persists in the modern populations of Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, but no Ciboney community continues. The name is Taino, usually read as something close to cave dweller or stone people, and it was applied to them by neighbors rather than chosen by themselves. That secondhand origin is the first thing worth knowing, because nearly everything recorded about the Ciboney was recorded by people who were not Ciboney.

The second thing is that the word has been made to carry two different peoples. Spanish chroniclers used it for a subject population in central Cuba and the southwestern peninsula of Hispaniola, described as living more plainly than the Taino lords they answered to. Twentieth-century archaeologists then borrowed the term for something else entirely: the Archaic Age foragers who settled the Greater Antilles thousands of years before the Arawak-speaking ancestors of the Taino paddled up from South America. Those earlier islanders fished and gathered shellfish, worked queen conch into gouges and cups, ground stone into bowls and heavy balls, sheltered in coastal caves and rock shelters, and made no pottery for most of their very long tenure. Cuban archaeology knows them by site names, Guayabo Blanco and Cayo Redondo, rather than by any ethnonym they would have recognized.

Ancient DNA has since shown the two populations really were separate, and that they shared the islands for centuries with strikingly little mixing. Whether the Ciboney the Spanish met were survivors of the older population, a Taino-speaking province at the western edge of the Taino world, or both in different places, is still unsettled. Specialists now mostly avoid the word in technical writing, preferring Archaic Age, Casimiroid, or Guanahatabey.

The afterlife of the name is not unsettled at all. Nineteenth-century Cuban writers of the siboneyista movement adopted the vanished Ciboney as a literary ancestor, a way of claiming an identity that owed nothing to Spain. The pose was sentimental and largely invented, but it fixed the word in the national vocabulary for good: a beach and a village near Santiago, a Havana neighborhood, and Ernesto Lecuona's 1929 song, which is how most of the world has met the name without knowing it once belonged to a people.