Araucos in Baracoa . They found excellent conditions for their development since it was a region in which hunting, gathering, fishing and agriculture could be carried out with ease. In addition, the hydrographic conditions they presented were unbeatable for navigation, all of which was used by the primitive aborigines.
Summary
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- 1 Migratory routes
- 2 Physical aspects
- 3 Language
- 4 Art
- 5 Sources
Migratory routes
Product of the Arauca wave, they arrived in Baracoa already connoisseurs of the art of ceramics and continued it. In this wave, other groups from the Amazonian Arauca throne with knowledge of agriculture also arrived. According to the ¨Indias¨ archive, they were called Taínos by their language, constituting the most evolved cultural phase of the pre-Colombian groups of Cuba .
In Baracoa they not only found an excellent climate, but also all the necessary conditions to develop hunting, agriculture, gathering and navigation. At the same time, they forced the former to continue their displacement towards the West of the country, thus covering the entire island with groups of different levels of development.
The groups stationed in Baracoa also developed navigation taking advantage of the hydraulic resources of this region. There is the possibility that they achieved great technology in the development of it for their time, since Columbus in his navigation diary makes reference to the matter:
«Leaving a barzo of that river he went to the southeast and found a schooner in which he saw five very large rafts that the Indians called canoe. As very beautiful and carved whips that would give pleasure to see them ».
The possibility of the existence of maritime relations with other islands of the Antilles is not ruled out , because if they arrived in this region from the Amazonian throne Arauca, they could later be related to the Caribbean, which were interrupted with the arrival in America of the European colonizer.
Physical aspects
Despite the fact that the anthropological evidence is somewhat abundant, it cannot be said that it is sufficient. The conclusions reached by physical anthropologists have a better basis, although it does not mean that the sources have been, in general, adequate.
Notwithstanding the foregoing, the anthropological evidence allows a fairly broad explanation of the physical appearance of the primitive man who lived in the Baracoa region.
Regarding this aspect, we can point out the affirmations of Christopher Columbus as well as those of the chroniclers of India, which constitute valuable and descriptive testimonies about the physical appearance of the Aruaco Indians of Cuba and the rest of the Antilles.
About his first contact with the aborigines in this area of Baracoa, Colón in his navigation diary says that they were very well made, with very beautiful bodies and very good faces, their hair thick almost like silks with ponytails and short, the hair is brought above the eyebrows, except for a few that are long, which are never cut. Elsewhere in the newspaper itself the admiral says:
“All of the forehead and very broad head, more than another generation that up to now has seen, and the eyes are very beautiful and not small, and none of them are dark, except in the color of canaries […]”
Columbus from the first moment captured two characteristic physical features of the primitive aborigines, their medium size and the deformation of the skull. These two characteristics are evident in the bone remains found, since the measurements of the long bones ensure that they are individuals of normal size and the skulls ostensibly present the very wide fronts that attracted so much attention to the discoverer.
Undoubtedly, the Indians that Colón saw on his tour of the north coast of Oriente province , in the section between Gibara and Bariay and Sagua de Tánamo were subtaínos and between Baracoa and Punta de Maisí those who came into contact with the discoverer They must have been Taíno. It is enough to remember that the route of his first trip along the north coast was limited precisely to the region with the highest density of subtaine population and the very limited area of location of the few Taino groups.
Language
The numerous quotes from the chroniclers of the Indies assure that the Taíno aborigines spoke the Arauca language in common.
“The whole language is also one,” says Colón in his review of November 1. In her account of the 12th of the same month, she reports that these women will teach the teachers their language, which is “one” in all the islands of Indians, and they all understand each other, which there is not in Guinea where there are a thousand ways of languages that one does not understand the other.
In other words, from the first trip, Columbus captured the uniformity that existed in the language of the Indians of the Arauca branch. That is the reason why his lackeys and Cuban interpreters could understand each other perfectly, and at the same time with the Aruaco Indians he found on the island of Hispaniola.
The other chroniclers insist on the linguistic uniformity of the Aruaco groups, contrasting it with those of the Aruacos of Cuba whom they considered different.
Aboriginal people talk to each other in the midst of very diverse situations: labor ceremonies, productive ceremonies, family relationships, etc., which indicates that they are capable of expressing a large number of ideas.
Many indigenous vowels retain their validity in the Cuban vocabulary. As an example we can cite Baracoa, yagua, jaba, hammock, batey, guajiro, casabe, Duaba, bejuco, bacán, burón, cupey, conuco, canoa, catauro, guayo, Guamá, hicaco, aguana, malanga, tobacco, sabana, mangrove , among many.
Art
Analyzing the artistic manifestations of the Tainos, it is necessary to refer to various forms of them.
- The pictographs that have been found located inside some caves, in association with a clay pot and fragments of buron. Then, it is one of the cases of Cuban pictographs.
- Decorated ceremonial artifacts and those for personal use, also decorated. These artifacts are characterized by their refined carving and remarkable bilateral symmetry. Among the former, the vomiting spatulas are notable, made with various materials, mainly bone and adorned at one end with anthropomorphic figures.
- Also noteworthy are the decorated woods, finished off at the top by anthropomorphic or zoomorphic figures, of true artistic quality.
- The decorated objects for personal use include, mainly, the hanging idols of stones, bones, shells and ceramics, the earrings and also the carved or smooth olives, with perforations in the apical region. Being an exception, we must assume that they had a certain hierarchical and ceremonial implication.
- Musical instruments: The Indians used the traps made of the large guamos or cobos snails, it is also known that the Cuban Indians had flautillas. They also used drums, which is made of a round wood, hollow concave, is as thick as a man more or less, as they want to make it.
- The sonorous olives, carved or smooth, strung in the form of necklaces, must have served as a personal ornament, and also as a musical instrument, given the pleasant jingle of the sound produced when they collide with one another.
