Esteban Mesa Montejo (c. 1868 – February 10, 1973) was a Cuban slave who escaped to freedom before slavery was abolished on the island in 1886.
In 1997 Michael Zeuske, a German historian and field researcher of Cuban slavery and life histories, found evidence of Esteban Montejo's real date of birth in the baptismal registers (in Sagua la Grande) - not 1860, but 1868 (December 26)[1] After being featured in a newspaper article, Montejo had been contacted in 1963 by Cuban ethnologist Miguel Barnet, who conducted a series of taped interviews with him.
He fled to the mountains, where there were communities of other maroons, refugee slaves who lived beyond the reach of planters.
Barnet edited the transcripts and published an account of Montejo's life in 1966, as Biografía de un cimarrón.
[2] An English translation was published in 1966 in the United Kingdom and Australia as The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave.