In Cuba, too, there were risings. Some slaves committed mass suicide, mocking their masters, as Fernando Ortiz has put it, “with their eternal strikes, their unending flight to the other world.” They thought they would thus be brought back to life, body and soul, in Africa. By mutilating the corpses so they would return to life castrated, maimed, or decapitated, the masters dissuaded many from killing themselves.
Mass suicides of slaves; response by masters to get them to stop
