Cauto: The River and the Name

Landscapes are an essential part of Cuba’s image and by identifying with them we generate a sense of belonging that is at the very basis of Cuban identity. Sometimes we conceive them in a generic way, recognizing the most representative features of the country’s physiognomy: the palm grove, the sugar cane field, the mountain range, the plain, the beach, among others, are examples of this type of symbols; other times we evoke specific places of our geography, iconic for their natural characteristics or their history: the Sierra Maestra range, the Turquino Peak, the Morro Castle, the Havana’s Malecón (seafront promenade), the Plaza de la Revolución square, Varadero Beach, the Viñales Valley.

In the case of rivers, it does not seem that they individually occupy a special place in the national imaginary, although they do in many localities. This could be explained by their limited length and reduced flow, a consequence of the elongated and narrow shape of the island of Cuba, characteristics pointed out by Antonio Núñez Jiménez in his work “The Cuban Archipelago”¹.

However, there is at least one river that achieves this distinction. Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, Father of the Homeland, dedicated an ode to it and Juan Cristobal Nápoles Fajardo, known as The Cucalambé, a sonnet. Máximo Gómez greets it upon meeting it again on May 9, 1895, while José Martí, at his side, calls it “beloved river”: “With soft reverence the chest swells and powerful affection, before the vast landscape of the beloved river”, and the following day, after seeing it again and surely remembering bitter moments, he writes: “And I suddenly thought before that beauty in the low and fierce passions of man”².

We are referring, of course, to the Cauto River, Cuba´s longest river, 343 kilometers long, from the Sierra Maestra to the Gulf of Guacanayabo, and a basin of some 9,000 square kilometers that extends through four provinces and is home to 10 percent of the country´s population.

Over the centuries, this river witnessed the brutal destruction of the peaceful aboriginal society and its waters experienced smuggling, piracy and slave trade. It was present during the forging of the Cuban nationality and connected its cradle, the historic city of Bayamo, with the world. Not far from its shores began the wars of independence; General Antonio Maceo protested against the capitulation, and José Martí fell in combat.

Nature, unleashed, made it for a day wider than the Amazon River, when in 1963 the rains of hurricane Flora separated its banks up to 80 kilometers from each other³, with river floods and inundations comparable to those in the biblical text on the universal deluge⁴. It seemed as if the South Sea and the North Sea had joined! Through the immensity of the waters, saving lives, Fidel passed.

Although scholars agree on the aboriginal origin of the name Cauto, its motivation and meaning have remained obscure to this day. The 19th century Cuban lexicographer and geographer, Esteban Pichardo, in the introduction to the third edition of 1862 of his “Quasi-resasoned provincial dictionary of Cuban voices” relates the following anecdote:

Crossing the Cauto River, which the natives called Cautó, near the confluence of the Contramaestre,  I stopped at a ranch or bojío, where there were four or five country people who looked like creole Chinese, and pondering the course and flow of the former, the oldest said with an emphatic and masterful tone: “they call this river Cauto because it is cautious…”⁵.

Father Bartolomé de Las Casas, an exceptional witness of the conquest, who lived in Cuba and knew our country well, testifies that the name is aboriginal: “On the southern or meridional coast, a powerful river that the Indians called Cauto, with a very beautiful riverbank, comes out almost in the middle of it”⁶.

The existence of other aboriginal toponyms with the segment cau in their structure, also evidences the Island Arawak origin of the name of the longest river in Cuba: Caujerí (valley in the province of Guantánamo), Cauta (mythological place)⁷, and Cautío (Island Arawak name of Florida)⁸.

Once the aboriginal origin has been confirmed, we must decipher the meaning of the name and its motivation. In solving this type of problem, linguists use the so-called “comparative method”, aimed at finding lexical and phonetic similarities between related languages. In the case of Island Arawak, they also use the limited information recorded by the chroniclers on the meaning of some words.

As archaeological evidence and linguistic studies have shown, the aborigines who inhabited Cuba at the time of the arrival of the Spanish were of Arawak origin and spoke a language called Taino or Island Arawak, belonging to that family of Amazonian origin⁹. In some villages in the South American region of The Guianas, a language known as Lokono, considered representative of this family, is still spoken. Silvia Kouwenberg, a linguist and professor at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, compared about two hundred words of Taino collected from Spanish and Italian sources of the 15th and 16th centuries with the corresponding forms of Lokono and concluded that they are closely related dialects of one and the the same language¹⁰.  

The Cuban researcher and linguist, Sergio Valdés Bernal, qualifies the Island Arawak as a moderately polysynthetic language with a certain degree of agglutination, and explains that polysynthetic is the language in which different parts of the phrase are joined to form words of many syllables; while agglutinating is the language that is characterized by accumulating different affixes, generally after the radical, to express grammatical relations¹¹.

Based on this characterization, we can formulate the hypothesis that the word Cauto presents in its structure several minor units of meaning and we will segment it for analysis as follow: C-au-to.

The Dutch researcher Claudius Henricus de Goeje, who wrote one of the best and most complete studies on the ancient Lokono, documented au with the meaning ‘space’¹².

Father Bartolomé de Las Casas, in his “History of the Indies”, makes a comment that suggests that, in Island Arawak, the morpheme ao has the same meaning as ‘space’.

They entered through the land of Cibao, a rugged land of great and towering mountains, all with large and small stones, as high as they are. And the Indians called it Cibao, from ciba, which is almost a rocky ground, or land of many stones¹³.

Indeed, ciba, ‘stone’ + ao, ‘space’ = cibao, ‘space of stones’, ‘stony ground’.

The Puerto Rican linguist Manuel Álvarez Nazario, who carried out studies aimed to the rescue and reconstruction of the Island Arawak, explains that both in that language and Lokono there is hesitation on the pronunciation of the phonemes /u, o/, which is due to the fact that the continental proto-Arawak only had three vowel phonemes at the beginning: /a/, /i/ and /u/, therefore, in the first two languages which derive from the third, to every /e/ corresponds an old /i/ and to every /o/, an old /u/. This resulted in a much closed pronunciation of syllable-initial /o/, in Island Arawak, giving rise to phonetic doublets in words adapted to Spanish in the style of cocuyo / cucuyo, bohío / bujío, etc¹⁴.

The closeness of Lokono and Island Arawak and the described peculiarity in the pronunciation of these languages, suggest that, in the latter, the morphemes ao and au possess the same meaning ‘space’ recorded by C. H. de Goeje for morpheme au in the former.

Let us now compare the meanings in Lokono of five words with the segment kau in their structure (equivalent to the segment cau in Island Arawak) with the meanings of the same number with the morpheme au / ao (see Table 1).

Table 1

Meanings of five words in Lokono that present the segment kau in their structure and an equal number that present the morpheme au / ao^{15, 16}.

As can be seen, the meanings in Lokono of the words with the segment kau in their structure are linked to the image of enclosed or surrounded spaces. This is evident in the first three examples in Table 1, while in the case of onikau, ‘goods’, its meaning is associated with the idea that goods can be conceived as things of our belonging (ani, anye, anyi, ony¹⁷) that we have enclosed, guarded. For its part, kauta, ‘a tree and its bark used in pottery’, is possibly related to the fact that the interior of the tableware pieces is an enclosed or surrounded space.

Probably, kau comes from the union of eke, ‘wrappage¹⁸ + au, ‘space’ = kau, ‘wrapped space’, ‘enclosed’, ‘fenced’, ‘surrounded’, ‘sinuosity’, where two phonemes /e/ are eliminated by apheresis and elision.

In contrast, the meaning of the words that present the morpheme au in their structure are related to the image of unlimited or open spaces. 

Given the proximity of the Island Arawak with the Lokono, we can hypothesize that the meaning of the segment cau is also associated with the image of enclosed or surrounded spaces. This assumption is confirmed when we analyze the characteristics present in the places that name some toponyms in this language. For example, Caujerí is the name of a valley surrounded by mountains, located in the province of Guantánamo, and whose only entrance for many years was a narrow gorge 300 meters long and 20 meters high, known as “El Abra de Mariana”. Likewise, Cautío, the Island Arawak name of Florida, according to the chronicler of the Indies, Antonio de Herrera, is related to the fact that its inhabitants covered their private parts with woven palm leaves¹⁹. Note that dresses “surround” the body, just as stockings or socks (named in Lokono káusse) surround the feet, or the body of the tableware pieces surrounds the interior space where some content is stored.

This analysis definitively confirms that, in Island Arawak, the morpheme au means ‘space’.

Finally, in Lokono the suffix -to / -tu is a form of the word oto (also utu, otu, uttu), which means ‘daughter’²⁰. It also has other functions; among them, form substantive adjectives and attributive adjectives. Let’s look at some examples^{21, 22}:

(a) ipirun, ‘to be big’; ipirutu, ‘something big’.

(b) wádin, ‘to be long’; wáditu, ‘something long’.

(c) ikihi, ‘fire’; ikihi-tu kaspara, ‘flaming sword’.

d) sa, ‘good’, ‘holy’; sa-tu ajia-hu, ‘Holy Word’, ‘The Gospel’.

Therefore, cau, ‘surrounded space’, ‘sinuosity’, + -to (suffix forming substantive adjectives) = cauto, ‘the sinuous’, meaning that coincides with the physical-geographical characteristics of the Cauto River, which, according to the Geographical Dictionary of Cuba, presents a “high sinuosity throughout its length, being more noticeable in its middle part and the lower part where numerous meanders are observed”²³ (see Figure 1).

Figure 1 Meanders in the course of Cauto River

For our aborigines, rivers, like the sea, were very important means of communication. For example, in a study on mobility carried out by the researcher of the University of Leicester, Jago Cooper, in an area that covered the territory of the current province of Ciego de Avila and the Jardines del Rey archipelago, it was demonstrated, based on archaeological evidence, the direct and regular interaction between the maritime environment and the interior of the island, with a possible center in the aboriginal settlement of Los Buchillones. River navigation from that point to the interior was identified as the most probable way to develop it²⁴.

The peculiarity of the Cauto of presenting numerous and pronounced meanders in its course, visually striking and with significant influence on river navigation in terms of the time needed to reach the destination and the need for control over the direction of the boat, motivated the Island Arawak name of the watercourse.

This characteristic of the Cauto continued to attract attention during the centuries after the destruction of aboriginal society: “Of very beautiful riverbank,” said Las Casas. El Cucalambé, on the other hand, draws with words a Cuban scene with a meander of the Cauto as a background²⁵ (the fragment of this author´s poem can be read in the Spanish version of this blog).

The aboriginal root is one of the three main ones that gave rise to Cubanness; it was the ingredient that was only once thrown into the metaphorical ajiaco (a traditional Cuban stew made from the mixture of meats, chopped tubers, corn, chili pepper and other vegetables) in which it was cooked. We could always compare ourselves with the Spaniards, because until the twentieth century immigration from the Iberian country was maintained; the same happened with the natives of Africa, since until the nineteenth century the slave trade did not disappeared. That comparison contributed to the awareness of our identity, of what differentiated us from others and what was about them in us. Perhaps that is the main reason for the success of the characters of the Cuban buffo theater, the Negrito (the black man), the Gallego (the Galician), the Mulata (the mixed race woman) and the Guajiro (the Cuban peasant). However, the aboriginal root, once mixed, could not be contrasted by the absence of referents. The origin of the traits they bequeathed to us is, fundamentally, unnoticed by us, and they could be more than we imagine, as some indications warn.

One of the dimensions of aboriginal heritage is found in language. Many words from the Island Arawak passed into Spanish during the Indo-Hispanic transculturation that followed the conquest. In the Spanish spoken in Cuba, not counting toponyms, 374 of these voices have been related by Sergio Valdés Bernal, who, in highlighting the significance of this lexical heritage, points out: “It is not so important for the number of words as for the transcendence of them, since they allude to objects, phenomena and concepts of the Cuban cultural and geographical environment, therefore, no word of Hispanic origin could replace its significant-denominator function²⁶.

However, beyond its Island Arawak origin, the etymology of many of these words and the motivation and meaning of most toponyms are unknown. In that sense, this article, in addition to a well-deserved tribute to Cauto River, is the beginning of an effort to contribute to fill that gap and enrich our knowledge about the cultural legacy of the Cuban aborigines with a view to gathering elements that allow us to assess with greater precision and depth their contribution to the formation of Cubanness.

Notes

1. Núñez Jiménez, Antonio. 2014. El archipiélago cubano [The Cuban Archipelago]. Third edition. Instituto Cubano de Libro and Editorial Científico-Técnica. Havana. Page 113.
2. Martí, José. 1991. Diario: De Cabo Haitiano a Dos Ríos [Diary: From Cabo Haitiano to Dos Ríos]. In Obras completas [Complete works]. Editorial de Ciencias Sociales. Havana.     Volume 19.  Pages 234, 237.
3. Castro Ruz, Fidel. 1969. Speech delivered on the occasion of the merger of the Cuban Institute of Hydraulic Resources and Agricultural Development of the Country (DAP) at the Habana Libre Hotel, May 26, 1969]. Consulted in www.fidelcastro.cu.
4. Celeiro Chaple, Maira and Hernández Santana, José Ramón. 2002. Las huellas del huracán Flora de 1963 en la memoria de Cuba. [The traces of the 1963 hurricane Flora in the memory of Cuba]. In Desastres naturales en América Latina [Natural disasters in Latin America]. Compilers José Lugo Hubp and Moshe Inbar. Fondo de Cultura Económica. Mexico DF. Pages 243-265.
5. Pichardo Esteban. 1862. Diccionario provincial casi-razonado de voces cubanas [Quasi-resasoned provincial dictionary of Cuban voices]. Third edition. Havana. Introduction.    Page XV.
6. Las Casas, Bartolomé. Historia de las Indias [History of the Indies]. Biblioteca Ayacucho. Caracas. Third volume. Page 85.
7. Pané, Ramón. Relación acerca de las antiguedades de los indios [Relation about the antiquities of the Indians]. New version with notes, maps and appendices by José Juan Arrom. Editorial Siglo XXI. América Nuestra Collection. Pages 22, 25, 59.
8. De Herrera, Antonio. 1730. Historia general de los castellanos en las islas y tierra firme del mar océano [General history of the Castilians in the islands and mainland of the ocean sea]. First decade, book IX, page 249. Digital copy downloaded from: http://archivo.org.
9. Valdés Bernal, Sergio. 2013. La conquista lingüísitica aruaca de Cuba [The arawakan linguistic conquest of Cuba]. Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional de Cuba, José Martí.
10. Kouwenberg, Silvia. 2010. Taino´s linguistic affiliation with mainland Arawak. In Proceedings of the twenty-second congress of the International Association for Caribbean Archaeology (IACA). The Jamaica National Heritage Trust.
11. Valdés Bernal, Sergio. 2018. El legado aruaco en el español cubano [The Arawak legacy in the Cuban Spanish language]. In Cuba: arqueología y legado histórico. Ediciones Polymita. Guatemala City. Page 194.
12. De Goeje, Claudius Henricus, 1928. The Arawak Language of Guiana. Cambridge University Press. New York. Page 170.
13. Las Casas, Bartolomé. Op. cit. Volume one, page 387.
14. Álvarez Nazario, Manuel. 1999. Arqueología lingüistíca: estudios modernos dirigidos al rescate y reconstrucción del arahuaco taíno [Linguistic archaeology: modern studies aimed at the rescue and reconstruction of Taino Arawak]. Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico. Pages 38-39.
15. De Goeje C. H., op. cit: a) p. 171, b) p. 170, d) p. 118, f) p. 170, g) p. 170,  i) p. 170, j) p.171.
16. Herrnhuter Bruder. 1882. Arawakisch-Deutches Wörterbuch, Abschrift eines im Besitze der Herrnhuter Bruder-Unität bei Zittau sich befindlichen-Manuscriptes. In Grammaires et Vocabulaires Roucouyene, Arrouague, Piapoco et D’autre Langues de la Région des Guyanes, par MM. J. Crevaux, P. Sagot, L. Adam. Paris, Maisonneuve et Cie, Libraries-Editeurs. Digital copy downloaded from: http://books.google.com: c) p. 134, e) p. 134, h), p. 93.
17. De Goeje, C. H. Op. cit. Page 118.
18. De Goeje. Op. cit. Page 131.
19. De Herrera, Antonio. Op. cit. First decade, book IX, page 249.
20. De Goeje, C. H. Op. cit. pages 43, 193.
21. Herrnhuter Bruder. Op. cit: a) p. 175, b) p. 177.
22. De Goeje, C. H. Op. cit.: c) p. 70, d) p. 70.
23. Las huellas del huracán Flora de 1963 en la memoria de Cuba.Núñez Jiménez, Antonio, et. al. 2000. Diccionario geográfico de Cuba [Geographical dictionary of Cuba]. Havana. Page 71.
24. Cooper, Jago. 2010. Modelling mobility and exchange in pre-columbian Cuba: GIS led approaches to identifying pathways and reconstructing journeys from the archaeological record. In Journal of Caribbean Archaeology. Special Publication #3.
25. Napoles Fajardo, Juán Cristobal. 1938. Poem “El amante despreciado” [“The scorned lover”]. In Rumores del Hórmigo. Havana. Pages 87-88.
26. Valdés Bernal, Sergio, 2010, El poblamiento precolombino del archipiélago cubano y su posterior repercusión en el español hablado en Cuba [The pre-Columbian settlement of the Cuban archipelago and its subsequent impact on the Spanish spoken in Cuba]. In Contextos, estudios de humanidades y ciencias sociales, No. 24. page 126.