Photo: above of Afro-Cuban revolutionary troops 1898 and a image of a Cuban Chunky Sweet potato soup. There is also a recipe at the end of the story.
When revolutionary soldiers in Cuba could not obtain food from peasants, or steal it from Spanish forces and their supporters, they turned to hunting and foraging for food. They also turned to cultivated subsistence gardens when circumstances permitted. “There were some places where you could have a garden,” says former revolutionary solider and Afro-Cuban Esteban Montejo. Born in 1860, Montejo, at some point during Cuba's Ten Year's War (1868-1878), escaped from slavery and lived on his own as a runaway where he learned to live off the land. Survival skills he learned as a slave and later as a runaway served him and other like him well during the War for Independence (1895-1898). By Montejos estimate 95 percent of Afro-Cubans fought in the ranks of the revolutionary forces, and many of them were former slaves as Spain did not abolish slavery in Cuba until 1886. Speaking of gardens in Camagüey, once a sleepy province in central Cuba, Montejo explains that a lack of conflict there allowed soldiers to sow subsistence crops such as mangos, “sweet potato, squash, okra, corn, peas, horse beans, beans like limas, limes, yucca, and peanuts” says Montejo. In my book Hog and Hominy I found that enslaved Africans grew and cooked with okra (African plant), sweet potatoes, or yams (African plant) almost universally around the Americas. Thus gardening techniques used to supplement their diets as slaves also feed them as revolutionaries. Here’s a Cuban chunky sweet-potato soup recipe that his great and fits with this story. With a little bit of translation it can be done as a vegetarian soup too:
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