the slaves QUOTES

1 " Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions. "

― Elizabeth Gilbert , Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

3 " Now that science has helped us to overcome the awe of the unknown in nature, we are the slaves of social pressures of our own making. When called upon to act independently, we cry for patterns, systems, and authorities. If by enlightenment and intellectual progress we mean the freeing of man from superstitious belief in evil forces, in demons and fairies, in blind fate--in short, the emancipation from fear--then denunciation of what is currently called reason is the greatest service reason can render. "

― Max Horkheimer , Eclipse of Reason

5 " Santería was traditionally an unacknowledged and underappreciated aspect of what it meant to be Cuban. Yet the syncretism between the Yoruban religion that the slaves brought to the island and the Catholicism of their masters is, in my opinion, the underpinning of Cuban culture. Every artistic realm--music, theater, literature, etc.--owes a huge debt to santería and the slaves who practiced it and passed it on, largely secretively, for generations. "

― Cristina García , Dreaming in Cuban

7 " All dreams of empire end because day breaks in the hearts of the slaves used to build it. "

9 " A lot of the nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness on the part of the founding fathers of the nation of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. The founders were aristocrats, and they wished to show off their useless eduction, which consisted of the study of hocus-pocus from ancient times. They were bum poets as well.

But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crime. For example, teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy:

1492

The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.

Here was another piece of nonsense which children were taught: that the sea pirates eventually created a government which became a beacon of freedom of human beings everywhere else. There were pictures and statues of this supposed imaginary beacon for children to see. It was sort of ice-cream cone on fire. It looked like this:

[image]

Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines.

The sea pirates were white. The people who were already on the continent when the pirates arrived were copper-colored. When slavery was introduced onto the continent, the slaves were black.

Color was everything.

Here is how the pirates were able to take whatever they wanted from anybody else: they had the best boats in the world, and they were meaner than anybody else, and they had gunpowder, which is a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulphur. They touched the seemingly listless powder with fire, and it turned violently into gas. This gas blew projectiles out of metal tubes at terrific velocities. The projectiles cut through meat and bone very easily; so the pirates could wreck the wiring or the bellows or the plumbing of a stubborn human being, even when he was far, far away.

The chief weapon of the sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and greedy they were. "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Breakfast of Champions

11 " There’s Gold in Them Thar Hills!

Cuba has a history of mining that dates back to 1520, when the Spaniards opened the previously mentioned Jaguar gold mine. In 1533, the Jobabo mine was the site of a four-slave uprising which lead to their deaths. To intimidate the slaves and calm the colonists’ fears, the bodies of the strikers were decapitated and put on display in Bayamo. Although the number of strikers was small, the ramifications of this strike were lasting. For the remainder of the 16th Century, a number of confrontations continued between slave owners and their indentured servants consisting of Indians and African field workers. In most cases, their slaves just simply ran away. In 1550, needing replacement workers, Spain granted a group of merchants the right to import additional African slaves into Cuba. Working conditions under Spanish rule were generally unregulated. For the mineworkers conditions were deplorable and continued to be unsafe and unacceptable for another 400 years. "

― Hank Bracker