IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 2 ENGLISH | Page 84

ants of the U.S. Phinney family, which established a prosperous business, coffee and sugar
cane plantations worked by slaves.
Hundreds of years of stories about victims of
slavery, like those involving Thomas Jefferson,
had to wait 200 years to be accepted as true. There
were rumors, complicit silence and misfortune,
but scientific confirmation through genetic testing allowed us to reread the history of that American president, who had an intimate relationship
with one of his slaves, who bore him several children.
The never before told drama of the Phinneys is a
similar story. It could have happened at Jefferson’s Monticello, in Virginia, yet it took place in
a tropical place filled with coffee trees and sugar
cane fields. It would be more than 160 years before a curious descendant tested his genetic-genealogical heritage and discovered the infidelities of
his DNA. We live at time when new technologies
create curiosity and reveal secrets.
Theodore Phinney, a descendant of the Mayflower’s pilgrims (considered to be the U.S.’s
founders), disembarked in Cuba, seduced by its
economic boom. He first tried being a carpenter,
because he already had experience in the trade,
but then had more luck as a machinist, a sort of
industrial technician at sugar mills that earned
very good pay at the time. This new occupation
allowed him to purchase lands he later turned into
coffee and sugar cane plantations, and hundreds
of black slaves.
Historical and genealogical research state that
Theodore Phinney was born in 1776 in the city of
Falmouth, Barnstable County, Massachusetts. He
was the acknowledged grandson of Benjamin
Finney (1682-1738), the tenth of thirteen children
born to John Finney, Jr. (1638-1719) and Mary
Rogers (1644-1718), daughter of the Rogers who
came over on the Mayflower.
In Cuba, Theodore Phinney built his family residence around 1825, in Lagunillas (Mantanzas),

84

and called it La Sonora. That same year, he married Englishwoman Ann Barrett, with whom he
had four children: Mary Deidamia, Theodore
William, Susannah and Joseph Manuel.
Lagunillas began to experience a socioeconomic
decline when the city of San Juan de las Ciegas y
Cárdenas was established, on March 8th, 1828.
The landowners of this new city took full advantage of the free trade concession granted by
Spain, an overt economic stimulus called “American City” because of the number of U.S. immigrants that lived and did business there. Ninety
percent of the business there was with the fitting
of its seaport and construction of sugar mills. The
introduction of the railroad also conditioned Cardenas’s economic development. The arrival of
French plantation owners escaping the anti-slave
rebellion in Haiti, and then of Americans, also
contributed positively because it fomented the
cultivation of coffee and increased the sugar cane
yield. This progress is directly related to names
such as Phinney, Berchast, Laurent, Lecllere, Villere y Blain, Alfredo Lajanchere, Antonio Bacot
y Jonicot, Biart, Bogd, Battle, Wilson, Gillot,
Maddan, Laferte, Boyd and many others.
In 1837, Cárdenas had the highest number of
slaves in any Cuban region: 57,386, more than
50% of the total population. By the end of the first
half of the nineteenth century, the area had 277
sugar mills. The Cárdenas-Colón-Matanzas triangle produced 55.56% of Cuba’s sugar.
In Cárdenas, the Phinneys had not only La Sonora, but also another plantation, Roble, where
they grew coffee and sugar cane. They also had a
warehouse at the port and hundreds of slaves. In
Sagua la Chica, in the Calabazar de Sagua zone,
which today belongs to Encrucijada (in the current province of Villa Clara), the Phinneys shared
their sugar mill La Palma with German businessman
Henry
Ezequiel
Emerson.
Along the area of the Sagua la Grande River