Havana

by Mark Kurlansky

  This, in fact, is the most widely recognized symbol of Havana. Giraldilla is a metal figure on top of the tower of the Castillo de la Real Fuerza, which guards the seaward entrance to Habana Vieja. Actually, it’s a copy, and the real one is preserved in a museum in the nearby Plaza de Armas, although even this 1634 statue appears to be a copy of one in Sevilla.

  According to legend, the statue represents Inés de Bobadilla, Havana’s only female ruler. She took over for her husband, Hernando de Soto, after he left to explore Florida. Never receiving word of his death, she stared out at the sea for years, looking for the ship on which he would return. It is perfect not only that the symbol of this city, celebrated for women, would be a woman, but also one who stares morosely across the sea to Florida, looking for a vanished love one.

  That sense of loss is true of all the great Caribbean cities. But in Havana there is also the fear of arrivals. At the end of “Odio el Mar,” Martí explains that the greater issue is not those who left, but those who came. He wrote:

  I hate the sea, which without anger bears

  On its complacent back the ship

  That with music and flowers brings a tyrant.

  Havana’s misfortunes have always come from the sea.

  •

  For its first two centuries, Havana’s central problem was that most of the time it was sitting on huge quantities of Spanish treasures. The Caribbean was the sea of pirates and privateers, who were working for foreign governments, enticed by the gold and other precious materials that the Spanish were taking from Mexico and South America, storing in Havana, and then shipping off to Sevilla. In 1503, the treasure that was brought to Spain, most of it off-loaded in Havana, was valued at eight thousand Spanish gold coins, known at the time as ducados.

  The quantity and value of the loot increased every year, so that in 1518 the treasure shipped from Havana to Spain was worth 120,000 ducados. Spanish galleons, which were huge ships for the time, were filling Havana Bay, lined with docks for storing and on- and off-loading all this treasure within eyesight of the small rustic town and its largely poor population. It was like wearing flashy jewelry in a bad neighborhood.

  The sailors moving the valuables were a regular presence in this village and had a lasting impact. There was money to be made from sailors, and Havana became, and remained for centuries, notable for its bars and drinking spots, for gambling and prostitution.

  In the sixteenth century, Havana had fewer than three hundred inhabitants and a few narrow streets of wooden houses, sometimes decorated with tile. The streets had prosaic, pragmatic names, which are still in use today. Some were named after their functions: The one where merchants set up shop was named Calle Mercaderes. Calle Basurero—Garbage Dump Street—no doubt not a popular street then, has happily lost its function and its name and is now Calle Teniente Rey, named after an army lieutenant. The first paved street—with cobblestones—was called Calle Empedrado, which means “paved street.” Calle Aguacate was named for the large avocado tree that grew there. On Calle Damas, young women, las damas, used to hang out in the balconies, and an official of the Inquisition lived on Calle Inquisidor. Calle Obispo—Bishop Street—was the favorite walking route of Bishop Pedro Morell de Santa Cruz in the mid-sixteenth century. And a resident kept a lamp burning twenty-four hours a day to honor saints on Calle Lamparilla.

  The sailors who came into Havana told tales of ruthless pirates who robbed, burned, and killed, and the townspeople shuddered in fear every time an unfamiliar ship appeared off the coast. Actually, some of these same sailors were themselves pirates, making note of the town’s layout and defenses and where treasure was stored.

  In 1538, an unidentified ship sailed into the harbor; its sailors spoke French, not Spanish. Hearing French chatter on the streets, the Habaneros locked themselves in their houses. The sailors were indeed French pirates, who soon set fire to a few of the houses. Wooden buildings with palm-frond roofs burn quickly. The townspeople, realizing that the pirates could easily burn down the entire town, scraped together six hundred ducados, which seemed to satisfy the Frenchmen, and they left.

  Soon after, three Spanish ships arrived, and the Habaneros insisted that they pursue the French pirates. The Spaniards found them in an inlet not far away. But the first Spanish ship inadvertently ran aground and the crew abandoned ship. The other two, seeing this, fled. This led the pirates to conclude that Havana had no serious defense, and they went back. The people offered them another six hundred ducados, but this time the pirates were in no hurry to leave. They sacked the town for fifteen days, taking everything of value they could find, even the church bells.

  The Spanish decided to fortify the city, building a castle by the opening of the harbor. The next pirate ship, a British one, landed further down the coast and avoided the harbor fortress by attacking from inland. The townspeople fled the city and hid out in the bush while their town was plundered.

  Such raids became a way of life in Havana. As new streets were added, they continued to be made very narrow, because this was thought to be more defensible. Every Habanero man was required to carry a sword at all times.

  In July 1555, a French pirate named Jacques de Sores arrived. His reputation was so great that England’s Queen Elizabeth competed with France’s François I for his services. Historians disagree on the number of ships under his command. Some say as few as two, others as many as twenty.

  These pirates took Havana in about thirty minutes. The governor, Gonzalo Pérez de Angulo, gathered up his family and household goods and quickly resettled on the other side of the bay, in what is now the section of eastern Havana called Guanabacoa. But Juan de Lobera, the commander of the fort, stayed and asked for volunteers to defend it. He amassed a force of sixteen—some Spanish, some African, and even a few Tainos. Even then, Habaneros came in many colors.

  They held out, locked in the fort, preventing ships from entering the harbor and even managing to shoot down a French flag the pirates had planted. When de Sores set the fort on fire, they finally surrendered. They had fought so hard that de Sores was convinced they had been guarding a fortune hidden in the fort. But all he found was the governor’s personal possessions, a small amount of cash, and his wife’s emerald ring. They took it, of course.

  They searched the city and found little. The fabled treasure was never in the town, but rather in a fleet that was not there at the time. The pirates then attempted to ransom the citizenry, but failed. Finally, they slit the throats of many of their hostages, burned the city to the ground, torched all the ships in the bay, and even destroyed large swaths of the countryside. Leaving Havana a blackened patch smoking by the sea, with its few survivors choking in the remains, they sailed away.

  There was little left of the town, but the townspeople rebuilt. Before the construction was even completed, another French pirate came and burned it down again. The Spanish responded by calling for a huge stone fortress, the Castillo de la Real Fuerza, to be built on the western side of the harbor opening. King Philip II sent a leading military engineer, Bartolomé Sánchez, and forty stonemasons to work on the project. All the Spanish colonies contributed money, because they wanted a fort that would protect their goods. But there was not nearly enough labor to build the fortress.

  By this time, the Spanish had been bringing enslaved Africans to Cuba for fifty years, mostly to work in agriculture. The crown commandeered the African slaves in the fields to work on building the fortress for a while, but this abruptly halted agricultural production and created food shortages. It even became difficult to provision ships. Then the crown ordered all the blacks who had managed to obtain freedom and had moved to Havana to escape agricultural labor to report for work or receive one hundred lashes. Freedom, it seemed, was a relative concept.

  The fortress was finally completed in 1582.

  In 1589, to add even more security, a tower and fortress were built at the eastern opening of the harbor. This was the high ground that had been used to warn of oncoming
ships even before any fortifications were built. Named Castillo de los Tres Reyes Magos del Morro, after the three kings at the birth of Christ, it is now usually called simply El Morro, which means “the high ground.” Another fortress, La Punta, was later built directly across from the Morro, on the very tip of the western side of the harbor, just up from the Castillo. The harbor entrance was now guarded by three fortresses.

  Still, more pirate raids came. And so every night a huge iron chain with wooden beams would be suspended between the two forts, across the opening of the harbor, to prevent ships from entering.

  And still the pirates came. Two more small fortresses were built on the coast. In 1674, a wall around the city was begun, but it would be another century before Havana was entirely walled off. The completed wall was five feet thick and thirty-three feet high, with nine gates to be locked every night. But even with the fortresses, the wall, the gates, and the chained-off harbor, for those staring out to sea, it seemed certain that more trouble would come.

  The opening of Havana harbor and the Morro seen from Habana Vieja in June 1877. Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly

  •

  Early Havana was a poorly maintained city. The streets were filthy, and there was as much mud as there was cobblestone. The Plaza de la Catedral, one of five main squares in Habana Vieja, was built on a low-lying, poorly drained spot that flooded after every rainfall. Apparently Havana humor was already fully developed, because the popular name for the stately plaza was Plazuela de la Ciénaga — the little plaza in the swamp.

  The Spanish had originally favored Santiago, in the eastern part of the island, the part closest to Spain, for their capital and main port. But from Santiago, a ship had to sail up the coast to Guantánamo and then through the treacherous Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti to get to the Atlantic. From Havana, by contrast, a ship had simply to leave the harbor.

  Plaza de la Catedral. The Drawing-Room Companion, 1851

  Starting in the sixteenth century, Atlantic trade became the mainstay of international commerce. Cuba’s export economy at the time was centered around cattle—beef and, especially, leather. Historical novelist Antonio Benítez Rojo aptly called leather “the plastic of its day.” Leather was ubiquitous. Most everything had leather in it. The rich, subtropical pasturelands of eastern Cuba produced hides that were thicker, shinier, and far superior to the leather produced from European pastures. The leather was primarily shipped from Havana, but it was Santiago and its prosperous eastern provinces that developed most rapidly, while Havana and its environs remained a backwater.

  But late in the sixteenth century, the island’s political and economic center of gravity began to shift when sugar, previously viewed as an amusement for a handful of wealthy people in Europe, became a European obsession. Sugar, despite its expensive dependence on African slave labor, became more profitable than leather, and the crop was produced in the west, in the areas around Havana.

  At the end of the sixteenth century, the Spanish monarchy promoted San Cristóbal de la Habana, the port village of vice, mud, and stench, from a town to an official city—more in recognition of its potential than of the reality. In 1607, the capital of the colony of Cuba was moved from Santiago to Havana.

  Havana grew as a commercial port. By the eighteenth century it was shipping sugar, leather, and tobacco—adding a new redolence to its infamous smells—and there was tremendous international demand for Cuban tropical hardwood. More and more Africans were being brought in as slaves to produce these profitable goods cheaply, especially sugar.

  When a shipyard was built in Havana in 1723, the port also became a major center of shipbuilding. Between 1724 and 1796, 114 Spanish military ships were constructed there. Havana-built ships were in great demand, because Cuban wood was thought to be vastly superior to that of Europe.

  By the end of the eighteenth century, life in Havana society was much less egalitarian than it had been a hundred years earlier. Cuban settlers who accumulated wealth built mansions, claiming they were descended from conquistadors and giving themselves titles, often fictitious ones that included the names of Cuban towns or provinces.

  Havana now had several large churches built of stone, and its narrow streets were lined with substantial stone-walled homes with tile roofs. The architects, as in much of Latin America, had come from Andalusia, in southern Spain, which had been under the control of Muslims for eight hundred years before the Christians drove them out in 1492. The Arab-influenced architecture they brought was designed for a hot climate.

  The houses the Andalusians designed had huge, ornate carved wooden doorways. The interiors were dark, with few windows to let in the hot sunlight. What little light entered was diffused by stained glass semicircles of deeply colored geometric panes above a doorway or window.

  At the center of each house was an outdoor patio, tiled and well-gardened with flowers, vines, and potted palms. Parties and most social events were held in the patio, which was the coolest place in the house.

  The Palacio de los Capitanes Generales in the Plaza de Armas looking much the way it does in its restored condition today. Illustrated London News, August 21, 1869

  The new houses were usually two stories high. The ground floor was used for storage and sometimes had a shop or two. The ground floor also had slave quarters. The family lived on the second floor, with balconies overlooking the street, as well as a gallery—a covered balcony above the patio.

  •

  By the mid-eighteenth century, with the city fortified with solid houses that would not easily burn, three fortresses, and a wall, the Habaneros seemed to be safe. The Spanish had a strong military presence. In the Plaza de Armas, the governor-general ruled from the high-ceilinged, red-draped “throne room” of the Palacio de los Capitanes Generales. And Habaneros were prospering, thanks to their busy port.

  But then, on June 7, 1762, a British invasion force of more than eleven thousand troops landed in Cojímar, a small port a few miles east of Havana. Commodore Augustus Keppel rallied his troops, waving his hat, and promised fruitful looting, offering the inspiring sentiment that after they took “yonder town . . . we shall all be as rich as Jews!” After months of bitter fighting, reinforcements from North America arrived, including troops that in a few years would fight against the British for American independence. On August 13, the Spanish surrendered Havana.

  To the Habaneros, this was a terrifying experience and a bitter defeat, a tragic disaster. They called the British troops “mameyes,” after a red-fleshed tropical fruit. To this day, a moment of reckoning—the angry wife coming home, or the boss calling someone to account—is called la hora de los mameyes (the hour of the mameyes).

  The memory lingered, though the British didn’t. During the two-month siege, the Spanish had moved the booty offshore, leaving little for the British soldiers to loot. London had no real interest in Havana anyway; it was just a pawn to be traded in negotiations. Less than a year later, in July 1763, the last of the mameyes were loaded onto ships and Havana was returned to Spain. In the Treaty of Paris signed by Britain, Spain, and France just a few months earlier, Havana had been traded back to the Spanish in exchange for Florida. William Pitt, the Elder, both a past and future British prime minister, argued that it was a bad trade. That controversy has never been resolved.

  THREE

  Danger of a Black City

  “¡Acabar con los negros!” repitió D. Candido fingiendo sorpresa. “No hará tal, por la sencilla razón de que de ellos está llena el Africa.”

  “Kill off all the blacks!” Don Candido repeated, feigning surprise. “He won’t do any such thing, for the simple reason that Africa is full of them.”

  — CIRILO VILLAVERDE, Cecilia Valdés (1882)

  What shaped and defined Cuba, and shaped and defined Havana, and yet has made them different, is slavery. It has at times been suggested that the impact of slavery on modern Cuba is exaggerated, but so profound and fundamental is slavery to the identity of both Havana a
nd Cuba that it would be almost impossible to overstate it.

  Slavery lasted longer in Cuba than anywhere else in the Americas. When I first visited the country in the early 1980s, it was still possible to meet Cubans who had known their African-born grandparents. Slavery was not abolished in Cuba until a Spanish royal decree on October 7, 1886. This means that when Fidel Castro came to power on January 1, 1959, slavery had been abolished for only seventy-two years. Cuba had been separated from its colonial mother country for only sixty years. The slave owners had opposed Cuban independence, and it was their grandchildren who made up a large part of the wealthy oligarchy that initially opposed Fidel Castro’s revolution.

  The Spanish began the African slave trade to the Americas. Christopher Columbus’s son Diego is thought to have started it in Santo Domingo in 1505, but some records indicate that Africans were being brought over as early as 1501. In 1513, Amador de Lares, a wealthy landowner in Cuba, was given permission to bring in four African slaves from nearby Hispaniola (the island now shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti). This request is the oldest record of slavery in Cuba. Spanish Hispaniola and Spanish Cuba were the first African slave colonies in the Americas, but slavery in the former was abolished in 1822—much earlier than in Cuba.

  In 1533, Cuba had its first slave uprising in a mine in Jobabo, in the eastern part of the island. The Spanish decapitated the rebels and put their heads on display.

  The whites feared the Africans, and tried to control them with terror. Rebellion aside, the worst fates were met by those who ran away, and yet slaves did run away regularly. Havana newspapers listed them in a column marked “esclavos profúgos” (fugitive slaves). A captured runaway would be mutilated and beaten nearly to death. Runaways would kill themselves rather than be taken. Sometimes they succeeded in hanging themselves or poisoning themselves. Eating enough dirt would sometimes work. If they had no other means available, according to contemporary accounts, they would sometimes swallow their tongues and choke to death. A common belief among the slaves was that in death they would be carried back to Africa, back to freedom.