by Marie Arana
We will never know how many indigenous wandered the Western Hemisphere before Columbus, since by the time the Europeans got around to counting them, so many had been killed by germs or swords. Scholars do tell us that when the Viceroyalty of Mexico celebrated its hundredth anniversary in the 1620s, the humming human population Cortés encountered in his march to Tenochtitlán had been reduced to a mere 700,000. Scholars also estimate that before the conquest, the hemisphere’s indigenous population may have ranged anywhere from 40 million to 140 million. A century later, fewer than 9 million were alive.
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As downtrodden and subjugated as the New World became under the Spanish boot, a natural impulse to violence against the oppressor finally began to flare in insurgencies throughout the hemisphere. The slow burn of anger had always been there. But the indigenous had been disoriented, hesitant to respond, paralyzed by colonial overlords too powerful to dislodge—forces that had hijacked and shackled whole civilizations. All the same, three centuries after Columbus’s landing, the animus began to surface more boldly, especially as Spain lost more and more footing in the world. Simmering resentments that the colored races—now a veritable rainbow of crossbreeds—harbored against “whites” began erupting in short, sharp explosions of collective rage.
One of the most resounding of these occurred in Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico in 1680. The Pueblo Indians, who had been crippled by one Spanish expedition after another for more than 150 years, had not had much success with insurrections. They had tried to beat back the hostile invaders, reject their enforced religion, buck all efforts at mass enslavement, but had been overcome by relentless reprisals from the other side. In 1598, when the colonial governor of Mexico, Juan de Oñate, set out with an expedition to colonize the fertile Rio Grande valley, an area already occupied by forty thousand Pueblo Indians, the Puebloans fought back. But they were overcome by Spain’s superior war machine. The victorious Governor Oñate, wanting to show the Pueblo Indians a lesson, ordered his men to amputate the right foot of every indigenous male over twenty-five. To cap that punishment, he forced the women into slavery and separated the children from their families so that they could be indoctrinated fully in the Catholic faith.
It took almost one hundred years, but the resulting anger was so overwhelming that it exploded in a fierce Pueblo uprising in 1680. The Indians swept into the Spanish plantations, killed four hundred of the whites, including women, children, and priests, and then drove two thousand more out of the valley, effectively purging their land of whites. There was a brutal calculus at work here: in order to rid themselves of Spanish rule and reclaim their identity after almost two centuries of relentless ethnocide, the indigenous had decided they would need to extinguish the very existence of their overlords. In other words, the whites needed to go or die. The Puebloans proceeded to destroy all the churches and Christian images, dissolve marriages effected under Spanish missionaries, and try to restore the world as they had known it before the Europeans arrived. It did not last long. In 1692, twelve years after the bloodbath, the Spaniards swept back in to reclaim their dominion over the Rio Grande.
The next large-scale uprising in the colonies took place in Quito in 1765. Unlike the convulsion in Mexico, which was largely about land and identity, this one was economically driven. For years, the citizens of that Andean colony—largely weavers—had suffered a punishing decline in their livelihoods. There were reasons: they had endured a plummeting population of Indians in the highlands where wool was produced, a glut of cheap textiles was pouring in from Europe, and a vertiginous economic spiral had taken hold. Desperate to survive, the Quiteños turned instead to producing contraband—aguardiente, for example, a sugar-cane liquor easy enough to make in anyone’s hut—and they found work in a buoyant underground that butchered wild animals, tanned leather, hawked food, and bootlegged fermented chicha. To quash this, the viceroy of New Granada (who effectively oversaw Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela) arbitrarily assigned all control of the viceroyalties’ private stills, and all the taxes their liquor sales might raise, to the Royal Treasury in Madrid. His peremptory crackdown threatened to bring a thriving, illegal market to a halt and create an even more dire economic crisis. The people of Quito wanted no part of it. They rose up, took to the streets in a violent revolt, and ultimately expelled the Spanish, setting up a coalition that managed to govern that city for a year before a highly armed viceregal army stormed in and retook the power, beginning an era of harsher rule.
Fifteen years later, the winds of dissent, which had bedeviled the Viceroyalty of Peru for decades, reached the Bolivian altiplano like a gale force. An Aymara native named Tomás Catari had been trying for years to persuade his Spanish overlords to curb abuses against the Indians of the mineral-rich area of La Paz, but he got no results save jail sentences and brutal floggings. Upon his release, secured only because his supporters took a Spanish governor hostage and threatened to kill him, Catari decided to mount a revolt against the whites. In September 1780, Indian rebel groups began raiding and looting haciendas and exterminating not only Spaniards but also anyone who did not pledge loyalty to their revolution.
Months later, as if a mortal pressure cooker were at work, a bloody race war broke out in Peru. The trouble began when a mestizo curaca, who would eventually call himself Tupac Amaru II and claim to be a descendant of the last ruling Inca, seized the Spanish corregidor Antonio de Arriaga after a long and vinous lunch. Holding the government official captive in his own house, Tupac Amaru ordered the governor to summon two hundred regional leaders—Spaniards and mestizos alike—to the plaza at Tungasuca. When they arrived, Tupac Amaru demanded that the governor’s Indian slave execute his own master. Then he marched on Cuzco with six thousand Indians, killing every white man, woman, and child in his way. This was no act of impulse. It was a last-gasp effort to turn history on its ear. Like Tomás Catari, Tupac Amaru had tried diplomacy at first, with no success whatsoever. For years, he had implored Arriaga to abolish the cruelties of the Indian tribute and be more humane to his subjects overall. Indeed, as the curaca responsible for collecting those tributes, he had run afoul of his Spanish masters for failing to do so. But his entreaties had gone ignored. Frustrated, angry, Tupac Amaru gathered a vast army of many more thousands, armed them with stolen muskets and hoarded arms, and issued his last warning to the Creoles, the American-born whites who had long expressed solidarity in their rage against the ruling Spaniards: “I have decided to shake off the unbearable weight and rid this bad government of its leaders. . . . If you elect to support me, you will suffer no ill consequences, not in your lives or on your plantations, but if you reject this warning, you will face ruin and reap the fury of my legions, which will reduce your cities to ashes. . . . I have seventy thousand men at my command.”
The bloodshed lasted for two years, ripping through Spanish enclaves as mercilessly as the invaders had ripped into Indian villages centuries before. Tupac Amaru had said very clearly that in order to restore the old order he might need “to put an end to all Europeans.” Moreover, in a fit of exultant hyperbole, Tupac Amaru claimed that he had received a royal order from Madrid to kill every puka kunka (literally, every red neck) who inhabited the Viceroyalty of Peru. His followers believed him. And it was precisely what they began to do. Euphoric, crazed by the rampant bloodletting, the victorious rebels danced, drunk, on the corpses of whites. There were reports that they fed on white flesh; that they ripped out hearts and painted their faces with the gore. Some, it was said, even indulged in the ancient practice of drinking from skulls. One leader demanded that the heads of all white eminences be severed and brought to him so that he could personally pierce their eyes. The news of these atrocities shocked the Creoles, who had encouraged revolt and wanted nothing more than to be rid of their colonial bosses. Now they could only recoil in horror. This was hardly the uprising against the king that they had hoped for. It was a race war. And it was as rabid against whites as their conquistador forebears had ever been
against brown.
In the end, the royalist armies swept in and crushed the Andean rebels, costing the Indians some hundred thousand lives. Tupac Amaru II was captured and brought to Cuzco’s plaza, just as his namesake Tupac Amaru had been brought to the same open square two centuries before. When the Spanish inspector general asked him for the names of his accomplices, he replied, “I only know of two, and they are you and I: you as oppressor of my lands, and I because I am striving to rescue it from your tyranny.” Infuriated by the insolence of that reply, the Spaniard ordered his men to cut out the Indian’s tongue and draw and quarter him on the spot. The directives were specific and registered officially to the letter:
His hands and feet will be bound by strong cords to the girths of four horses, which will be galloped to four corners of the Tahuantinsuyu, ripping his body apart. The torso will then be taken to the promontory called Cerro Picchu, from whence he had the temerity to invade, intimidate, and lay siege to this city, and there it will be burned to ashes in a public bonfire. . . . Tupac Amaru’s head will be sent to Tinta so that it can hang from the gallows for three days, after which it will be thrust on a stake at the main entrance to the city. One of his arms will be sent to Tungasuca, where he was a cacique, to be displayed in the same way, and the other to the capital province of Carabaya. His legs will be dispatched, respectively, to Livitica and Santa Rosas in the provinces of Chumbivilcas and Lampa.
The inspector general’s minions went about their grim business. They carved out his tongue with one whack of the sword. But the four horses to which they tied Tupac Amaru’s wrists and ankles would not comply. Each time they hoisted the Inca up like a spider sprawled on a web, his hands and feet slipped through the straps, and he fell to the ground. The soldiers slit his throat instead; hacked off his head, hands, and feet; and sent them off to be displayed on pikes, as ordered, at various crossroads of six cities. The same was done to his wife, Micaela. The tortures and executions were repeated throughout the day until all members of his family were dispatched. When he saw his mother’s tongue carved from her head, Tupac Amaru’s youngest child issued a piercing shriek. Legend has it that the sound of that cry was so heartbreaking, so indelible, that it signaled the end of Spanish dominion in America.
Word of Tupac Amaru II’s grisly fate electrified the colonies, inflaming and terrifying any and all who would contemplate a similar rebellion. For blacks, for whom slavery’s inhumanities were untenable, the urge only grew. They had little to lose. But for white Creoles, who were, after all, part of the ruling class—if only by virtue of their skin—dreams of insurgency now spurred the fear that revenge would come not only from Spain but also from a massive colored population. Those fears were magnified in New Granada months later, when an army of twenty thousand marched against the far more powerful Viceroyalty in Bogotá to protest high taxes. One of the leaders, José Antonio Galán, an illiterate mestizo swept by the fever of the moment, proclaimed the black slaves free and exhorted them to turn their machetes against their masters. When they began to do just that, Galán was condemned to be hanged until dead, drawn and quartered, and beheaded, with his limbs sent to every district in which he had lived. To ensure that such a vile subject would never be born again, his house was dusted with salt, the grains tamped deep into the surrounding earth. It was a warning that revolt would be met with brute force—a prophylactic against all malcontents.
THE MACHETE, THREE HUNDRED YEARS LATER
Cuba, 1955–1970
The men who knew how to use a machete to cut cane demonstrated one day that they also knew how to use a machete to kill.
—Fidel Castro, 1962
Carlos Buergos, footloose and free until he found himself in a Cuban jail, and then—less than a dozen years after—in an American penitentiary, had been born at the cusp of revolution. It was August 1955. Cuba had been free of Spain’s yoke for less than sixty years, but once again people were fretting about independence. The powerful whites, the predatory foreigners, the tyrannical government and corrupt oligarchs had become for them a yoke of a different kind.
Two years before, Fidel Castro had led a group of 150 rebels against one of the largest military garrisons in Cuba. The mission had been simple: to capture a massive repository of arms to bolster his revolution. For Castro and his rebels, the regime of Fulgencio Batista represented the epitome of a despotic, debauched, and essentially colonial rule. The banks, national resources—indeed, the entire economy under Batista, including the lion’s share of industry—was now controlled by American companies. The Platt Amendment, passed by the US Congress in 1901, a few years after Cuba won its independence from Spain, had prohibited any foreign power aside from the United States from colonizing or entering into treaties with Cuba. It spelled out very clearly that America could intervene in Cuban affairs whenever it desired and could establish military bases wherever it felt necessary. Passed into Cuban law shortly thereafter, it remained in place for decades, making the island a virtual colony of the United States. In 1940, when Batista was elected president, the Platt Amendment was struck from the Cuban constitution to conform with Franklin Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor Policy” of 1933, but the spirit remained, Washington’s dominion over the island lived on, and Batista continued to fortify ties with American businesses, lining his own pockets in the process.
Batista was, according to Castro, a monstrum horrendum, an illegal president who, after his first elected term, luxuriated for eight years between New York’s famed Waldorf Astoria Hotel and Florida’s Daytona Beach, manipulating Havana from afar and collaborating with the American Mafia. In 1952 he retook power in a military-backed coup and installed a puppet government dependent entirely on American commercial interests. By the late 1950s, Batista and his coterie had handed over more than 60 percent of all sugar production and profits to companies in the United States. Nearly half of all arable land was owned by American businesses. It was high time, according to Castro, for Batista, his criminal cronies, and US kleptocrats to be cast from Cuba altogether.
For all the grassroots support he was able to rally, Castro’s fledgling rebellion against the Moncada Barracks ended badly, and Castro ended up in prison. But in May 1955, just as Carlos was reaching fetal maturity, ready to launch himself into a nervous world, Fidel and his brother Raúl Castro were freed on amnesty. Public opinion had soured on Batista’s brazen 1952 power grab—a few distinguished Americans had begun to grumble about Cuban corruption, police brutality, and a reckless indifference to the poor—and Batista needed all the positive publicity he could muster. Someone suggested that amnesty for all political prisoners might be a timely palliative.
Jettisoned from Cuba’s shores by Batista’s rash publicity stunt, Castro and his rebels now repaired to the jungles of Mexico, where they met the Marxist Argentine doctor Che Guevara and began planning their next assault on Havana. It was precisely as Castro and Che hunched over crude maps of the Cuban archipelago, honing their strategy, learning what they needed to know from hardened veterans of the Spanish Civil War, that Carlos entered this mortal world and saw light for the first time. Castro and Che’s combined curriculum was straightforward: they would use guerrilla warfare—the David versus Goliath principle of rebellion—pitting a tiny, nimble, and fearless force against a far larger, more cumbersome one. Just as Carlos blinked his eyes open for the first time, Castro issued his famous proclamation of war: “I believe the hour has come to claim rights, not request them—to seize rather than to beg.”
Before Carlos’s fifth birthday, Cuba had been turned inside out. Comandante Castro had landed on the jagged shore of southern Cuba with a tiny contingent of eighty-two rebels who—bedraggled, hungry, sea tossed, and sunburned—made their way through cane fields, fainting, stumbling, until they reached the inland region of Alegría de Pío. From there, they sped to take cover in the Sierra Madre mountains, before Batista turned his army against them. A furious guerrilla war followed, lasted two years, and gradually attracted a formidable army
of Cubans to the rebel side. On New Year’s Day 1959, frightened by their sharp reversal of fortune and fearing the worst, Batista and his deputies fled Havana, thousands of Cubans flooded the docks to hie to other shores, and, within a week, the comandante and his barbudos—the bearded ones—swept from their strongholds in the Sierra Madre to the panicked streets of the capital. The victory was instantaneous, the euphoria contagious. Carlos’s father, who had worked for years as a stevedore, hauling sugar on and off ships and drinking himself into a rum stupor, was eventually sent to cut sugar cane in the emerald fields of Matanzas and prove his loyalty to the revolution.
By the time Carlos was ten, there wasn’t enough to eat. There had been numerous reforms that had made life somewhat better for the poor—better access to education and medical care, improved hygiene—but there were seven hungry people under his father’s roof, and a cane cutter’s wage had not put enough food on the table. Worse, Cuban sugar production, which since the early 1900s had been the greatest in the world, now slipped to a far rung in the global commodities market. No amount of newly minted revolucionarios sent out to work the fields could match the burgeoning sugar boom in Brazil, India, and Europe. As Cubans liked to say, sín azúcar no hay país—without sugar, we have no country. And that was precisely what US politicians had in mind: to starve Cuba out of its fling with Socialism and incite the people to revert to their former ways. A massive trade embargo, put in place by the administration of President Dwight Eisenhower, expanded under his successor, John F. Kennedy, and adopted by their allies, was now squeezing the Cuban economy to the breaking point. After initial, unrequited overtures to the United States in 1960, Castro eventually turned to the Soviet Union to help feed the people. Carlos’s father, too, turned to desperate measures: he began taking his eldest boy to bars to sing for a few centavos, or for a plate of bananas. The boy’s anxieties, a product of his skittish time, played out in risky behavior: Carlos began to steal. Small thefts at first. Fruit from a neighbor’s tree. Trinkets from a schoolmate. By the time he was thirteen and his voice had dropped, he was pilfering bottles of rum when the bartender wasn’t looking, slipping them under his jacket, selling them in the barrio. He snitched from women’s purses, grabbed whatever he could, and sold it clandestinely for the little pocket change it would bring him.
