`Descendants' Of A Long-Extinct Tribe Crop Up In U.S.

MIAMI - They were the first people Christopher Columbus encountered when he stumbled onto the New World more than 500 years ago. They were also the first victims of his conquest.

Less than 100 years after the discovery of America, the Taino Indians seemingly disappeared, decimated by disease and slavery.

But these early indigenous people of Puerto Rico, eastern Cuba and other Caribbean islands might have left something most scholars have yet to recognize: descendants.

"I am a native Taino Indian from Cuba," said Jorge Luis Salt of Miami, the leader of a group called Ciboney Tribe, which re-enacts Taino stories and folklore. "We want to tell the whole world we are still here."

For most academics, Tainos are long gone, although some aspects of their culture remain.

The word hurricane, for instance, comes from the Taino word juracan, or god of the killer winds. Cassava bread, a Taino staple made from yuca, still is baked in Puerto Rico and other parts of the Antilles.

This summer, archaeologists uncovered the largest Taino structure ever found, a round wood-and-thatch building measuring more than 60 feet in diameter, in the Ciego de Avila province of central Cuba.

Now, people who describe themselves as modern Tainos are cropping up in Florida, New Jersey and other states with large Caribbean communities. They say their blood line and traditions were kept alive by Tainos who fled to the mountains of Puerto Rico and other islands, where they mixed with Spanish military deserters and runaway African slaves.

No claims of 100 percent Indian

The new Tainos do not claim to be full-blooded Indians, but they note that many Native Americans are not full-blooded either.

"The Taino culture of 1492 is extinct. But so is the Spanish culture of 1492," said Jorge Estevez, who doesn't look Indian. He was born in the Dominican Republic and grew up in New York.

Those who call themselves Tainos are not the first to try to rescue a lost culture. The Mashantucket Pequots of Connecticut returned from the brink of extinction, gaining federal recognition for their tribe in 1983. Today, thanks largely to a gambling casino they operate, they are one of the wealthiest Indian nations in the United States.

Still, most academics say it is impossible for the Tainos to make a comeback after 500 years. Anthropologists say the problem with claiming Taino heritage is linear succession - the uninterrupted practice of traditions and customs from one generation to the next. And little is known about these Indians who cultivated tobacco and worshiped hurricanes.

`The test is continuity'

"The test is continuity - not 20 generations later people deciding to reclaim a culture," said Luis Martinez Fernandez, an expert in Caribbean history at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.

But not all academics are ready to write off the new Tainos.

"I don't know if you can tell people they are extinct when they are standing there right in front of you," said Anne Britton, an anthropologist from the University of Miami.

She compared the Tainos with the Iroquois of New York and the Caribs of Dominica, whose cultures have been close to disappearing.

Salt, who calls himself a Taino, works as a 911 dispatcher, but in his free time he dons a red-and-yellow mask with parrot feathers and tells Indian stories. Together with family and friends, he has formed a troupe that performs Indian dances and music and shares folklore at fairs and picnics.

"When I tell other Cubans that I'm a Taino, the response I often get is: `Tu estas loco?' (Are you crazy?)" said Salt, 33, who works for Miami Fire Rescue.

Salt grew up in Miami, like many other exiles, after leaving Cuba as a toddler. From his father he learned Indian folklore, such as drawing a circle in the sand, with five dots outside to give thanks to nature for the seasons and the harvest. Salt's father had learned these traditions from his mother, a curandera, or folk medicine woman, from Santiago de Cuba.

Grandmother looked like Indian

In 1978, Salt returned to Cuba to visit his grandmother and was struck by how much she looked like the pictures of American Indians in his Encyclopaedia Britannica back home.

"To me, she looked like Geronimo," said Salt, who has Indian-like features and often is told he does not look Cuban. "She told me she was a Taino."

Isabel Bustamante of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., goes a step further in her bonding to Taino culture. She calls herself the spiritual mother of the Clan of the Sea Turtles from Ponce, on the southern coast of Puerto Rico.

Bustamante, who prefers her adopted Indian name Cuyael, or Daughter of Light, plans to christen her granddaughter in a Taino ceremony she says goes back to Columbus' times. She says her son, who lives in Puerto Rico, is a cacique, or chief, of the 25-member clan.

"As far as I'm concerned, the Tainos absorbed the European society," said Bustamante, who was left paralyzed after a car accident and moved to Fort Lauderdale five years ago. "We became what my father called the `invisible people.' "

Such assertions make many scholars cringe.

"You are not a Taino because your mother told you so," said Stinson, an expert on Caribbean indigenous cultures. "There's no way someone who calls themselves a Taino can prove it."

Some say the Taino movement is really a yearning for identity among some Caribbean people living in the United States. Others say self-described Tainos are after federal recognition and the potential for the reservations and casinos that can come with it.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs has had no formal request for Taino recognition. But at least one group in New Jersey is trying to trace its genealogy, a precursor to applying for federal status.

"We would like some land for a Taino community - a place where we could live and reclaim our culture," said Pedro "Guanikeyu" Torres, a self-proclaimed tribal chief from Puerto Rico who lives in Millville, N.J.

Others say renewed interest in Taino culture is a grassroots trend, as legitimate as studying the Spanish and African legacies of the Caribbean. But exploring one's Taino roots is taboo in the Caribbean, Barrerio said.

"Taino is part of our cultures, but we've never been allowed to go there," said Jose Barreiro, a sociologist at Cornell University who studied one rural community in eastern Cuba thought to have descended from the Tainos.

Some customs long lost

The road to the roots of the Tainos is tricky. Some customs were recorded by Spanish priests and monks centuries ago. Others are long lost.

Esteves, who works for the Museum of the American Indian in New York, has learned some Taino traditions from his Dominican mother and grandmother, who grew up in the countryside and referred to themselves as Indians. He has borrowed others from Native Americans.

On weekends, Esteves, who often is mistaken for Puerto Rican, likes to visit powwows in the New York area with his cousins and several Puerto Rican friends.

At first, the drum-beating islanders were an oddity on reservations, he said. "Initially, it was, `Here come those damned Puerto Ricans pretending to be Indians," Esteves said. "Now they say, `Here come those damned Tainos.' "