"The Cuban philologist José Juan Arrom has traced the origins of the word "maroon" further than the Spanish "cimarrón", used first in Hispaniola to refer to feral cattle, then to enslaved Indians who escaped to the hills, and by the early 1530s to enslaved Africans who did the same.He proposes that the American Spanish word derives ultimately from the Arawakan root word "simarabo", construed as 'fugitive', in the Arawakan language spoken by the Taíno people native to the island.