The Cuba Plantation Bell – Plantation Artifact

This Cuba Plantation Bell was made in 1832 in the town of Trinidad, Cuba. Its specific whereabouts for nearly a century are unknown, but in 1926 it was gifted to Belmont Hill School by the General Manager of the Trinidad Sugar Company1.

KIDNAPPED AND EXPLOITED

Historians estimate that roughly 7% of all enslaved Africans brought to the Americas in the 18th and 19th centuries were transported to Cuba to work on the island’s many sugar and coffee plantations. That’s about 600 to 900 thousand people2. Cuba attracted an enormous amount of trade in human cargo; despite bans on the slave trade from the United States, Great Britain, and Spain, the island’s illicit trade of humans continued for decades until 1867, when the last documented ship carrying enslaved Africans landed in Cuba3.

DISCOVERING THE BELL’S HISTORY

In 2018, student historians at Belmont Hill School researched school archives as well as academic scholarship on Cuban slavery to determine how the bell had been used. Had this bell called free people to church, or enslaved people to labor? Its intended use can be discerned from the way in which it was mounted at the school. The December 1925 issue of the school paper The Sextant notes that, once it arrived, the bell would be “mounted on scaffolding as is the custom in Cuba.”2 Syracuse University historian Theresa A. Singleton has observed that bells mounted on a “simple frame, were used on plantations everywhere to structure the daily routine of slave workers.” 4

Taken together, these two pieces of evidence persuaded the student scholars and school administrators that this bell had indeed contributed to Cuba’s violent slave labor regime. Following a vote by the school’s Board of Trustees, the bell was removed from campus in late summer 2020.

The Cuba Plantation Bell and The Robbins House symbolize the two poles of this racial wealth gap. The bell represents the systematic theft of wealth – and of life – through forced labor. The house represents the dream of home ownership, of being able to invest one’s earnings in such a way that wealth can be passed along to the next generation.

Thank you for educating yourself about Concord’s African-American and anti-slavery history.

Works Cited

1 Moody’s Manual of Railroads & Corporation Securities,

2 The Sextant Volume III, No. 1 (Belmont Hill School, Christmas 1925),

3 Cuba and the United States in the Atlantic Slave Trade (1789–1820)” Tomich, Dale. “World Slavery and Caribbean Capitalism: The Cuban Sugar Industry, 1760-1868” Theory & Society, Vol. 20, No. 3 (June 1991), 304.

4 Theresa A. Singleton, “Nineteenth-Century Built Landscape of Plantation Slavery in Comparative Perspective,” Chapter 5 in The Archaeology of Slavery: A Comparative Approach to Captivity and Coercion (Southern Illinois University Press, 2015).

5 The Robbins House, “The Cuba Plantation Bell,” Brochure.