For millions across the globe, tracing ancestry is a journey back through severed roots. Cuban artist Jorge Luis Álvarez Pupo has embarked on this profound and painful quest, creating a multidisciplinary project titled Sweet Thing to reconstruct a family past fragmented by the transatlantic slave trade.
A Puzzle with Missing Pieces
The catalyst was a simple question at a family reunion. When an elder asked if he had traced his Cuban ancestry, Álvarez Pupo responded with irony, explaining it would be like assembling a puzzle missing most of its main pieces. The core reason is stark: some of his ancestors are counted among the 879,800 people shipped to Cuba during the slave trade, a process that began by stripping them of their original names and connections.
His project uses sugar as a central, symbolic motif, woven into a fragmented family album. It combines archival documents, contemporary photographs from his parents' birthplaces, and conceptual self-portraits. The visuals are often intentionally blurred, mimicking the way memory softens and falters at its edges.
Walking the Grounds of Exploitation
Álvarez Pupo’s research is anchored in two remote Cuban communities tied to the sugar industry. One has just over 1,200 residents; the other is nearly abandoned, where Creole was still spoken as recently as 1998. Both have suffered population decline following the collapse of the sugar economy.
He retraced steps to places like the old Triunvirato plantation, where the enslaved woman Carlota led an uprising in 1843. He also visited the Slave Route National Museum, housed in the former overseer’s house at Triunvirato—a site where plans for enslavement were made and rebellion first flared. He documents sites like Pito Cuatro, places created solely for economic exploitation and then forgotten when they were no longer useful.
The Brutal Statistics of Survival
The project confronts the horrific scale of the trade. Colonial records indicate an annual death rate of about 5% among the enslaved population on Cuba’s sugar plantations. This is in addition to the approximately 102,000 who died before even reaching Cuban soil. Of those transported, roughly 766,300 disembarked, meaning about 12.9% perished during the transatlantic crossing.
Álvarez Pupo reflects on the tools of control: shackles, iron collars, whipping posts, and branding irons used to break spirits and mark human beings as property. He notes how foremen became sadistic figures, directly responsible for population decline on the plantations.
Translating Absence into Presence
This work is a personal meditation on how mass social phenomena like slavery cause historical amnesia. The title, inspired by Nina Simone’s Four Women, plays on words to address the essential difficulty of drawing a coherent line to origins for millions of people.
The artist’s own father’s story echoes this fractured history. He began working at age eight, fetching water for cane cutters, and later laboured in coffee, tobacco, and on Havana’s docks. Education was a distant dream fulfilled only through night school in adulthood. When asked about his elders, his frequent reply was, “I don’t remember.” Álvarez Pupo believes those answers were etched on his father’s body.
Sweet Thing stands as an ethical act of remembrance. Each image is an attempt to translate absence into presence, insisting that to remember is to refuse to consign those lives to silence. It references a not-so-sweet chapter of human history, ensuring its legacy is neither softened nor forgotten.
