Silver, Sword, and Stone

by Marie Arana

  Carlos got beaten—often furiously—by schoolmates, storekeepers, neighbors, for these transgressions, but he learned to pick himself up, wipe blood from his face, laugh. He didn’t have much respect for authority; he didn’t have much respect for anything, really, apart from his immediate needs at hand. He wasn’t in the minority in this. There were plenty of disillusioned young men around who felt as he did. Soon he fell in with a gang of fledgling delinquents, sulking on street corners, scheming against the machine.

  Whenever his father was sober, he would try to correct Carlos’s impulse to misbehave. But lectures left little impression on the boy. In 1970, when Carlos turned fifteen and Castro commanded all Cubans to head for the fields to double the sugar output to ten million tons and recover Cuba’s historic place in the market, Carlos’s father decided this was his opportunity to instill some discipline in the boy. He handed Carlos a machete and forced him to join in the punishing business of hacking at cane. It was there in those fragrant fields, redolent of sweetness, where African slaves had toiled for hundreds of years, that Carlos witnessed something that would change him forever. An argument between two men escalated into a brawl so murderous that one finally swung his machete and brought it down with a brutal stroke on his opponent’s face. The halo of blood, the victim’s electrifying howl, the dead silence afterward as the attacker glanced around, eyes wild—these were details, all too human, in a tableau he would never forget.

  CHAPTER 7

  REVOLUTIONS THAT SHAPED LATIN AMERICA’S PSYCHE

  They say grand projects need to be built with calm! Aren’t three hundred years of calm enough?

  —Simón Bolívar, 1811

  MADRID

  1807

  Latin America had endured three hundred years of Spain’s repressive rule when an unexpected window of opportunity flung open and forever altered history. That miracle arrived in the form of a scandal engulfing the royal house in Madrid. In the fall of 1807, King Carlos IV, a shallow man with a nervous temperament, sent a frantic letter to Napoleon Bonaparte of France, begging for help. He had just learned that his son, the crown prince Ferdinand, was plotting to dethrone him and possibly poison his mother. In truth, King Carlos had become the laughingstock of his country. His prime minister, Manuel de Godoy, had been cuckolding him for years. His wife, Queen María Luisa, whose sexual appetites and predatory habits were legendary, had taken a string of young, handsome bodyguards as lovers. A vain, flighty woman, she had frolicked her way from one paramour to another, persuading her witless husband to reward them with high stations, wreaking havoc with one misguided appointment after another. Indeed, it was her old inamorato Prime Minister Godoy who had declared a disastrous war on England, draining the empire’s coffers and initiating Spain’s headlong spiral to bankruptcy. All this was too much for young Prince Ferdinand, who had begun to despair at the royal house’s preposterous state of affairs. He, too, dashed off a letter to Napoleon, inviting the emperor to choose a French bride for him, bless the wedding, and so unite the empires.

  Napoleon saw his chance. Taking rank advantage of the family squabble, he persuaded the Spaniards that not only would he defend King Carlos’s rule, he would conquer Portugal and make Iberia whole for him. The Treaty of Fontainebleau was signed in October of that year. Desperate to remain king, Carlos gave his blessing to Napoleon to march twenty-five thousand troops through Spanish territory to Lisbon. But come November, Napoleon sent quadruple that number, securing a firm foothold in Spain and overwhelming Lisbon in a bloodless coup. Queen Charlotte and the royal Braganza family had fled Portugal just in time, along with ten thousand loyal subjects, and resettled in Brazil, from which they would rule the Portuguese empire for the next eight years. Four months later, Napoleon’s generals slipped into Spain’s closely guarded fortresses and took control of the whole peninsula. Spain was paralyzed, under occupation. Its colonial administration, all financial interests, the iron reign of the Council of the Indies, suddenly ground to a complete halt.

  But the colonies didn’t know it. Even as ordinary Spaniards were showing their grit and astonishing the French by mounting a fierce guerrilla war, Spanish America lived on in languid, blissful ignorance. Though Napoleon’s generals were sacking the madre patria’s cities, garroting its leaders, and raping its women, life in the colonies went on in its customary, backwater mode. Given Britain’s implacable war against Napoleon and its yearlong blockade of Europe’s shores, all communication with Latin America had virtually been gagged. To make matters worse, President Thomas Jefferson’s misguided Embargo Act of 1807, which effectively throttled all overseas trade and crippled the hemisphere’s markets, had compounded the regional isolation.

  In Caracas, news that Spain had been savagely overrun by the French was not known until a full seven months later, in July 1808, when two old, dog-eared issues of the London Times arrived in the captain general’s office, sent on by a dusty functionary in Trinidad. The journals seemed ordinary enough: four-page broadsheets with financial notices. But wedged in between the shipping news and the real estate offerings was the stunning revelation that Spain’s king had been deposed and that Napoleon now ruled the country. Andrés Bello, then secretary to the captain general of Venezuela, translated the notices for his boss, who simply dismissed them as English invention. The truth was confirmed days later when two ships, a French brigantine and an English frigate, arrived in Venezuela’s port of La Guaira at precisely the same time and with versions of the same story. The French delegation hurried over the mountain that shields Caracas from the sea, presented itself in resplendent uniforms, and announced that Spain had capitulated—all its colonies, including the patch on which he now stood, now belonged to Napoleon. Not long after that, the English captain came huffing over the hump to proclaim the opposite: the French were flagrant liars, he said. Spain had yet to yield. Indeed, according to him, a junta in Seville had formed to represent the embattled nation, and Britain had pledged it unconditional support.

  It was stupefying news to the Venezuelans. Were they to believe that Britain, which had fought Spain bitterly for centuries—whose pirates, among them Sir Francis Drake, had raided Spanish galleons and made off with the king’s silver—was suddenly Spain’s best friend? It was a pivotal moment for frustrated, embittered Creoles who had been denied power for three hundred years. Much as Napoleon had sensed opportunity in the king’s sordid family spat, Caracas’s homegrown and beleaguered aristocrats now saw opportunity in their king’s sudden and total impotence. They decided to seize the reins, shape destiny, and wrest independence at last.

  There were obstacles, and more than a few. Many rich, white colonials with strong family ties to Spain were adamantly against violent revolution. They wanted more rights, a bit more say in government, and certainly more control over their financial affairs. But they had no stomach for the bloody upheavals the French and Haitians had undertaken to win their independence. The Creoles also knew they were but a small coterie in a vast population. They could not count on the colonies’ blacks, mulattos, and indigenous to rise alongside them against Spain. Indeed, the Creoles had been lording over the darker races, using and abusing them for hundreds of years. Naturally, slaves and menial laborers, who far outnumbered the whites, regarded all landowners with deep suspicion. They feared that, without Spain’s flimsy laws, the whites would grow ever more brutal. With Spain, at the very least, one could point to a written code that censured maltreatment of the indigenous, even if that code consistently went ignored. With white Creoles, who knew what might happen?

  A year went by as Spain’s colonial governors fretted about their futures and Creoles debated one another to arrive at a revolution they could all agree on. The first declaration of independence, “el primer grito” (“first shout”), came a year later in 1809 in the halls of the Royal Audience of Quito. On August 10, in the dark just before dawn, a cabal of Creole revolutionaries barged into the royal palace and presented the sitting governor with an official order anno
uncing that, according to the will of the people, his duties were over. The power was now theirs. It was a fleeting independence, lasting a mere seventy-three days and not, by any means, resounding with any bold assertions about the inherent rights of men. Indeed, the rebels were all too willing to express loyalty to Ferdinand VII, the king’s feisty, ambitious son. But it was a tiny island of declared liberty in the course of centuries of imposed rule, and it showed, perhaps for the first time, that whites were as serious about breaking colonialism’s shackles as the indigenous, who had endured far worse for hundreds of years. Eventually the viceroyal forces that surrounded Quito laid siege to the city and pounded it into submission, and by October 25, the revolutionaries were rotting in the dungeon, awaiting the hangman. Within a few months, in a grisly fanfare of public executions, they were all dead. Anyone who dared express sympathy, citizens were told, would be charged with high treason and killed. It was a teaching moment for the Spanish, a chastening one for Quiteños, but the lessons would soon be lost in the great wave of revolutions that followed.

  BOLÍVAR’S WARS

  He rode, fighting all the way, more miles than Ulysses ever sailed. Let the Homers take note of it!

  —Thomas Carlyle, 1843

  A far stronger revolt eventually bubbled up in Caracas, where the stakes were higher for the colonizer, if only because Venezuela (“little Venice”) was a richer, more renowned colony. Leading the insurgency were two young brothers—scions of an aristocratic Creole family—who organized clandestine meetings in one of their family homes outside Caracas and lent their considerable wealth to the enterprise. They were Simón Bolívar and his older brother, Juan Vicente. Simón Bolívar, who was twenty-seven at the time, had accumulated life experiences well beyond his years. He had lost his father at three, his mother before he was nine, and—being an unruly, rebellious orphan who preferred the company of slaves—ended up being raised by stern, disapproving uncles, who sent him off to Madrid to acquire a modicum of discipline and sophistication. What he acquired instead was the conviction that Spain, the madre patria, was an incompetent master. Hosted by an aristocratic family friend who offered him a place to stay and an extensive library, Bolívar came of age as a frequent guest of the royal court in Madrid. There he was given a rare glimpse into the scandalous concupiscence that mired the royal family, but he also traveled to France and England, amassing a formidable knowledge of the literature and culture of the Enlightenment.

  At nineteen, he married a lovely Spaniard with family connections in Venezuela, but was widowed months later when his young bride died shortly after he brought her to Caracas. For years, he wandered Europe, heartbroken and rudderless, squandering his days as a rake and voluptuary, drowning his sorrows in drink or the dance halls, and devouring the works of Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Thomas Paine. In Paris, he met the celebrated explorer and scientist Alexander von Humboldt, who had nothing but scorn for Spain’s cruel colonial subjugation of the Americas. In London, he was mentored by Francisco de Miranda, who not only had fought in the American Revolution and later become friendly with George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, but who’d also gone on to command a French rebel army in the bloody uprising against King Louis XVI. As Bolívar immersed himself in the fervor of this liberal, antimonarchical cohort, he became increasingly radicalized. When he returned to Caracas, it was because he had sworn to dedicate himself to liberating his native land.

  Bolívar wanted no part in a “soft” revolution. He was unwilling to wrest power as the Quito rebels had, while continuing to pledge loyalty to Ferdinand VII, now sovereign of the shaky, besieged edifice that was Spain. He had little patience for those who waved banners of liberty while swearing allegiance to a king. Unlike many of his fellow Creoles—unlike his own departed father, who had flirted with rebellion decades before—Bolívar understood that a revolution would never be won in the polite halls of government. It would need to engage the people. It might need to employ extreme violence.

  Over the years, traveling through Napoleon’s France and the Duke of Wellington’s England, meeting fellow revolutionaries from numerous colonies in Latin America, his convictions about independence had grown rock hard and absolute. He knew Ferdinand VII all too well—an insufferable little whiner with whom he had sparred as a boy—a man for whom he had no respect whatsoever. And if Bolívar despised the prince, he loathed the queen, whose lechery was notorious and whose weaknesses he knew intimately through one of her many lovers, his boyhood friend Manuel Mallo. The strongest contempt, however, he reserved for Carlos IV, whose dithering inadequacies had enslaved an empire. Bolívar had spent too much time nursing his animus to let go of it now. His hatred for Spain had grown to such proportion that it dwarfed “the sea that separates us from her.”

  On April 19, 1810, revolutionaries stormed the palace in Caracas and let the governor know that the Venezuelan people wanted him gone. The governor protested, but when he stepped out onto his balcony, he saw a mass of humanity gathered in the main plaza, shouting him down. Within two days, he and his deputies were on a ship bound for Philadelphia. To Bolívar’s chagrin, the new government called itself the Supreme Junta of Caracas Dedicated to Preserving the Rights of King Ferdinand VII. But its most pressing declarations expressed his dearest wishes: the colony would now engage in free trade; the Indians would no longer pay tribute or be enslaved for their inability to pay it; the slave market would be a thing of the past.

  That year, like dominos tumbling in a row, the colonies of Buenos Aires, Bogotá, Quito, and Mexico declared their sovereignty, established juntas, and dispatched Spain’s governors to the open seas. But the royalists’ retribution would be fleet and brutal. Although Spain was impotent at first to defend its hold on its colonies, a vast army of royalist forces throughout the region mustered immediately to beat back and squelch the epidemic of insurrections. Even as the bloodied head of Mexico’s ferocious rebel priest Miguel Hidalgo swung from a rooftop in Guanajuato so that the world could see how Spain would deal with America’s revolutionaries, the hemisphere broke out in a hydra-headed war that consumed the better part of fourteen years, leveled whole cities, brutalized the population, and fed Mother Earth with the blood of hundreds of thousands. To bolster the Spanish army’s numbers in that faraway land, the king’s generals mobilized blacks and Indians to fight on their side and welcomed whole bands of hard-bitten roughriders who wanted no truck with the white Creoles’ bid for power.

  The overseas royalist forces that converged on the fledgling rebellions held their own, spitting out Bolívar and his like, executing revolutionaries when they could, driving them into internal or external exile. But there was nothing quite like the swift, draconian punishment the madre patria loosed on its children when the French were finally crushed at Waterloo and King Ferdinand turned all his lights on reconquering the Americas. After the Napoleonic Wars, Spain emerged fiercer, more terrible, more sharpened by combat than the revolutionaries could have imagined. La reconquista fell like a heavy sword on the Indies, replete with all the cruelty and truculence the conquistadors had brought to the task in the first place.

  Eventually the white Creoles realized they would have to look beyond their race for help in fighting Spain’s ravenous war machine. In Venezuela and Colombia, Bolívar understood that he would need to recruit the masses and unite the races: in order to populate his troops, he sought soldiers among the indigenous, blacks, slaves, roughriders, the infirm, the doddering, the impossibly young. Anyone capable of carrying a stick was hauled to the barracks and conscripted. Sailing back to the South American mainland from exile in Haiti, he determined to construct a new, unforgiving, wholly desperate revolution. He was well aware that white aristocrats like him, who had sparked revolution for economic and political profit, were simply not numerous enough to finish the job. Every bit of advice his mentor, the black president of Haiti, Alexandre Pétion, had given him cemented another brick in his conviction. He would free the slaves, as Pétion had insisted he do. He would
incorporate a democratic fighting force, employ unconventional guerrilla tactics, feature the gambit of shock and awe. If necessary, he would go to violent extremes, as Haiti had done when its blacks butchered whites in the name of freedom. Whatever the costs, he would liberate his people from Spain.

  In 1813, riding the muggy Río Magdalena from Cartagena to Cúcuta and then crossing the snowcapped cordillera to Venezuela, he engaged anyone who would join his last-ditch quest. At first, the only willing recruits came from society’s dregs: slum dwellers, runaway slaves, out-of-work peasants, ex-convicts, near-naked tribesmen. They were untrained, undisciplined, weaponless, shoeless, with little more than a pair of tattered trousers, a flea-ridden blanket, a frayed hat. In time, he created a fierce and formidable army, expert in resilience and surprise. As he went from success to success, battling his way back to Caracas, the city of his birth, he proclaimed a policy of “War to the Death” against all Spaniards, setting the revolution on a zero-sum course. He also sacrificed many a soldier in the enterprise.