The Gainesville Sun. Posted April 22, 2001.
Orlando Sentinel
GAINESVILLE -- The University of Florida libraries are poised to undertake
an ambitious rescue operation in Cuba -- preserving centuries of handwritten
history deteriorating in that country’s National Archives.
Historians are eager to examine what are known as the Notary Protocols, 10
million handwritten pages that tell the story of colonial Spain in the intimate
details recorded by a notary: the colonists’ births and deaths, wills and
marriages, property deeds and ship manifests.
It’s hard to overestimate the significance of making the documents
available, said John Ingram, director of collections and the principal
researcher on the project.
"I am convinced that the ‘Protocolos Notariales’ in Cuba’s
archives will assume their rightful place of global importance for New World
history and culture," Ingram said. "These records will truly open a
window in time."
Scholars in Florida will be particularly interested in the protocols, which
span the 16th through 19th centuries, because similar records from the state’s
Spanish colonial period were destroyed when the United States invaded Florida in
the early 1800s.
After two decades of interest, the university and the Cuban National
Archives last month reached an arrangement that will allow the university to
send researchers to microfilm the documents and perform digital scans, Ingram
said.
Plans call for making as many of them available on the Internet as Cuba’s
government allows.
But Bruce Chappell, an archivist at the university, said because there are
tensions between the U.S. and Cuban governments, "it’s still possible
that there could be problems, and this could come to a halt."
Archiving the documents and making them available to scholars outside Cuba
will be "a big feather in the cap" of the university, already a leader
in collecting and preserving material from the Caribbean and Latin America,
Ingram said.
Pedro Malavet, a University of Florida law professor, has written
extensively on the role of the notary in Spanish colonial life, which he
characterized as "even more important than a lawyer."
Long before zip disks and computer drives, notaries were required to keep
copies of every record they notarized for the entirety of their lives, and to
keep them in good condition.
The penalty for lying in a notarized document was death.
Malavet, who is researching the historical treatment of race in Puerto Rico,
said reading between the lines on notary records is relevant to his work because
they show who was allowed to buy houses and where they were allowed to buy them,
who was able to buy slaves and which slaves were freed.
"Racial discrimination is difficult to prove by records," Malavet
said. "But this is information that makes that kind of analysis possible."
The University of Florida must still find grant money to pay for the
project. But Ingram said he was confident that private foundations will pay for
a pilot project early next year, as well as the eventual full-scale archiving,
because the documents are so significant and many are in danger of being lost to
decay.
"I’ve seen some of the . . . volumes, and some of them are in a
condition I would liken to a very well-tatted piece of lace," Ingram said. "There
are many holes, and the paper is very fragile and will soon be lost entirely.
When you see history and information that is likely not available anywhere else,
you can’t help but be affected.
"I’ve been in this business 24 years, and you don’t want to
see these things disappear."
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