Cubans celebrate Amistad's arrival in historic slave-trade port of Matanzas

Matanzas, Cuba The black-hulled schooner Amistad was unmistakable, sailing into the deep, long harbor of this industrial port, bright main and foresails taut in the steady breeze.

If arrival in Havana is expected to be a bigger event – the boat will arrive March 25, the tenth anniversary of its launch, as well as the international day of commemoration for victims of the international slave trade – its first arrival in gritty, historic Matanzas was more personal for some, both onboard and ashore....

The ship made landfall in Cuba Monday at a working pier stacked with oil drums and watched over by customs and security officials, the first stop of the Connecticut-based schooner’s friendship visit to the country that shares with the United States intertwined histories of slavery, exploitation, family bonds and conflicted emotion.

A delegation of local government and cultural officials, historians and writers, dancers and drummers all welcomed the Amistad to the port city that at its height admitted tens of thousands of African captives to be enslaved in Cuba’s booming 18th-century sugar and coffee plantations, and that still imports so much of this nation’s petroleum that a port official, chuckling, compared it to Houston.

Read full original article published in THE DAY on 23 March

See the daily progression of Freedon Schooner Amistad

 

• Author(s):Ted Mann
• Source:TheDay.com
• 23-03-2010