Slaves from Africa worked on the crop fields here. Also, escaped slaves often found refuge in the caves of the Valley. The Pan de Azucar site contains the ruins of the biggest hacienda, where slaves were taught different trades.

Located amidst Indigenous territory, the settlements were inhabited, owned, and governed by Jews who lived there together with free and enslaved persons of African and Indigenous descent. (Brief synthesis OUV)
See www.jodensavanne.org

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries some peripheral places were used as refuges or camps by maroons. Wiki

... from 1807 with sugar plantations for which labor came from Africa, Madagascar, India, Malaya and China, soon relegated to the status of slaves. The Cirque de Cilaos was cultivated for nearly 100 years by escaped slaves known as marrons whose leaders names are commemorated in the landscape of the cirques (UNEP-WCMC)

Testimony to maroonage or resistance to slavery

The region provided refuge to escaped indigenous slaves, the traces of which can be seen at Maroon archaeological sites such as hiding-places and a network of trails. The ‘Windward Maroons’ of the Blue Mountains region were one of two Maroon strongholds in Jamaica.