Sweet thing: a personal look at a photographer’s Cuban slavery heritage – photo essay
Yusuf Nuruddin
Sweet thing: a personal look at a photographer’s Cuban slavery heritage – photo essay https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/jan/18/sweet-thing-a-personal-look-at-a-photographers-cuban-slavery-heritage-photo-essay?CMP=share_btn_url
S. E. Anderson
Sweet thing: a personal look at a photographer’s Cuban slavery heritage – photo essay
From the remnants of my great-grandparents’ Cuban home near the sugar plantation that is part of Unesco’s Slave Route programme – where they were once enslaved - to personal artefacts, each piece reconstructs an uncertain past
Sweet Thing N° 17, ca 1960-2024.
I could picture my grandmother, born in 1898, as the proud yet humble daughter of former slaves.
Gathering information on our origins that might help with constructing self-identities could be a beautiful endeavour.
Unfortunately, for millions of people worldwide, retracing a past filled with unfinished stories is like trying to nurture a tree whose roots have been severed.
Several years ago, a teenage relative was presenting the entire family tree at a reunion in Belgium. At a given moment, an elder turned to me and asked if I had ever traced my ancestry back in Cuba. I looked at her with a mix of irony and cynicism then briefly explained that trying to put together my genealogy would be like assembling a puzzle that is missing most of the main pieces.
The reason? Some of my ancestors are included in the statistics related to the slave trade, that shameful process in which millions of human beings were trafficked and deprived of any connection to their environment of origin. The first step was to change their names.
That brief exchange was the catalyst that led me to begin working on Sweet Thing, a multidisciplinary attempt to reconstruct an uncertain past where I use sugar as a symbolic motif by adding it to a fragmented family album from what remains. It includes archival photographs, contemporary images from my visits to the places my parents were born and conceptual self-portraits I’ve created in my studio.
I still remember that narrow ribbon of earth winding down from my grandfather’s house towards the old Triunvirato plantation – the same fields where an enslaved woman called Carlota, who led an uprising in 1843, raised her voice against chains. In the silence of that road, it feels like a place that has been frozen in time.
1/ Colonial records suggest an annual death rate of about 5% among the enslaved population in Cuba’s sugar plantations, in addition to the about 102,000 deaths before arrival on Cuban soil. Some of my ancestors survived. 2/ Across the centuries of colonial rule, tools of torture and public punishment became common instruments of control. Shackles and iron collars bit into flesh to break spirits; whipping posts and carts carried victims through town squares and branding irons marked bodies as property.
It is virtually impossible to state precisely how many ships took part in the transatlantic slave trade, or to give an exact tally of the people moved between African, European and Cuban ports. Using the best available compilations, roughly 879,800 people were shipped to Cuba, and about 766,300 disembarked; About 12.9% of them died in transit.
The visuals are often blurred – not as a technical fault but as an honest mimicry of how recollection falters and softens at its margins.
Unlike traditional genealogical records, my process is non-linear. Missing documents and eroded narratives force me to construct memory through place and imagery.
There are sites where the sole reason for their existence was related to a purely economic interest in maintaining the labour force close to the source of exploitation. When that source was no longer exploitable, these sites were forgotten and doomed to disappear over time. Pito Cuatro in Las Tunas province was one of those.
My research spans two remote Cuban communities tied to the sugar industry – one with just over 1,200 residents, the other nearly abandoned, where, even in 1998, Creole remained a spoken language.
Both places have suffered population decline due to economic hardship and the collapse of the industries. Through this series, I want to explore displacement, survival and the fragile nature of inherited memory.
During slavery, foremen became some of the most sadistic characters, and were largely responsible for the decline of the plantation populations.
My parents were born near a sugar mill.
When I stepped through the entrance of the Slave Route National Museum in Cuba, I found myself standing in what used to be the overseer’s house at Triunvirato. It was here, behind these doors, that plans to hold people in chains were made, and just beyond, the very first island-wide slave uprising flared into life.
In this project, I try to reflect on the impact that certain mass social phenomena, such as slavery, wars, the Holocaust, and/or meteorological events of great magnitude, have had on the loss of historical memory, either by selective amnesia, lack of references, or omission.
The title is inspired by passages from Nina Simone’s well-known song Four Women, not as a direct reference per se to the content of the song, but rather as a play on words that I use to try to address one of the essential causes that make it difficult in my case, and millions of other people, to draw a coherent imaginary line to our origins.
This work refers to a tiny fraction of a not-so-sweet chapter on the history of humankind that took place not so long ago. Each image is an attempt to translate absence into presence, and to insist that remembering is itself an ethical act: a refusal to consign those lives to silence.
1/ My father started working at the age of eight, helping to provide water to the workers at the sugar cane fields and later cutting cane himself. All his life, he carried the weight of labour – shouldering coffee’s cherry-laden branches, bending under tobacco leaves in the sun, stacking burlap sacks on Havana’s docks until his back ached. School was a distant promise: he only got inside a classroom when he was grown, going to night school after the day’s work was done. 2/ When I asked my father specific questions about his elders, he very often answered: “I don’t remember.” I think most of those answers were etched on his body.
s. e. anderson
author of The Black Holocaust for Beginners
www.blackeducator.org
"If WORK was good for you, the rich would leave none for the poor." (Haiti)
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