Lucumí Cabildos and "Liberated Africans" in Havana, Cuba

These data relate to the Yoruba diaspora to Cuba during the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The cabildos list relates to Yoruba-based socio-religious organizations in Havana, which were legally permitted and often referred to as mutual-aid societies. These institutions were often a central place in which African cultures creolized in Cuba. The second dataset relates to a list of names of nearly 4,000 people who were registered by the Havana Slave Trade Commission between 1824 and 1841. These data included documented African names, which were interpreted to determine the language of names. Henry Lovejoy recruited Olatunji Ojo (Yoruba), Abubakar Babajo Sani (Hausa) and Umar Hussein (Dagomba), who volunteered to interpret names from this sample independently from each other. Collectively, these names specialists are familiar with well over 20 dialects found in the Bight of Benin interior and could identify likely ethnolinguistic origins for about 85% of the sample.