Please provide a source for the claim of a three-caste society in Cuba. I have never seen any objective evidence of such a thing, neither in restrictive laws nor in genetic discontinuity. See, for example, the "Discontinuity" section of Features of Today’s Endogamous Color Line. You may be conflating Cuba with the former B.W.I.
Last warning. Caribj's posting privilege will be suspended 24 hours from now unless he posts a source for the above implausible claim or unambiguously retracts the claim.
In addition, Caribj also disputed my claim that "In post-emancipation Jamaica, the beleaguered White population allied with the Coloured elite (the descendants of the famous Maroons) to keep down the free Blacks." My claim was backed up by the citation: Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1988) page 215 and Frank W. Sweet, Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise and Triumph of the One-Drop Rule (Palm Coast FL: Backintyme, 2005) page 99. (Incidentally, see The Rules 3.1.5.) His rebuttal was the mere assertion that the "Mulatto elite" (Foner's terminology) of 1838 Jamaica did not in fact descend from the Maroons. Caribj is now required to back this up with a source within 24 hours or unambiguously retract the unlikely claim.
Since Caribj's last suspension for rules violation was for 8 months, his next suspension will be for 16 months.
I thought the maroons in jamaica kept to themselves and for the most part looked on slaves and/or mixed blood blacks with distaste. Even today the maroon communities in jamaica consider themselves separate nation and do not mix with Jamaicans from those outside their communities. If that is the case then how could the "mulatto elite" be their descendants?
Even today the maroon communities in jamaica consider themselves separate nation and do not mix with Jamaicans from those outside their communities. If that is the case then how could the "mulatto elite" be their descendants?
I do not know. Nevertheless, I draw your attention to two points: First is pedigree collapse. Every Jamaican alive today had more ancestors in 1655 (when the Maroon communities first formed) than the entire population of the island. And so in a genetic sense (in the sense of having at least one ancestor) virtually every Jamaican today descends from the same million or so ancestors.
Second, this means that perceived ancestry is more a matter of cultural self-image than genetics. And so, the question comes down to asking, "Why do today's maroons choose to distance themselves from today's Coloured?" Again, I do not know. But my guess would be that when, in 1795, the Brits (and Coloured) reneged on the treaties of 1738-40, all but the Accompong maroons rebelled. All of Jamaica's maroons were destroyed and exiled except for the one community that did not rebel against the Crown (Accompong). Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance predicts that this one surviving maroon community's self-image would thus become a heroic self-image of hatred and rejection of Brits and Coloured, precisely because Accompong betrayed the rest of the maroons in the rebellion of 1795-96.
After again studying the essays in Laura Foner and Eugene D. Genovese, eds. Slavery in the New World: A Reader in Comparative History (Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969) as well as Beckles and Eric Foner, I think that Eric Foner may have been talking about "spiritual" or "political" descent, rather than genealogical descent.
Since ancient times it has been well known that slave societies can survive only by maintaining a slave-control population that is at least as numerous as the slave population. In medieval times, such families (called "yeomen") were allowed to opt out of the serf/slave economies by their commitment to take up arms and crush any serf/slave insurrection that might arise.
In Latin America the slave-suppression, slave-catcher role was played by the Meztizo population. In North America, it was the poor Whites who escaped forced labor by agreeing to keep slaves subjugated. In Barbados, it was the imperial garrison that took this role (Barbados is geographically unique). And in Jamaica from 1738 to 1795 it was the maroons who formally agreed by treaty with the British to perform slave-suppression, slave-catching duty. In short, starting in 1738 the maroons were granted freedom in return for their helping the British gentry keep the slaves under control.
A century later in 1838, when the UK emancipated Jamaica's slaves, the British in power sought to keep the freedmen under political, economic, and social control. The freedmen were no longer slaves but they could become politically powerful and so dangerous to the island's rulers. The British were a minority in 1838, of course, and so they solved the problem by allying with the Coloured descendants of Afro-British liasons. In short, starting in 1838 the Coloured were granted limited civil rights in return for keeping the freedmen under control.
It is possible that the reference to the Coloured elite of 1838 "descending" from the maroons of a century before was a reference to their similar roles in society: keeping Blacks subjugated.
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