Havana

by Mark Kurlansky

  The more the slaves were abused, the more they rebelled and the more the whites feared them, and then they were abused even more. The whites believed that the slaves were primitive creatures who hated them and could be controlled only by fear. José Martí championed abolition and once wrote, “Only those who hate the Negro see hatred in the Negro.”

  •

  Despite being one of the first slave colonies, Cuba had a relatively small slave population compared with other Caribbean colonies, such as Haiti and Jamaica, at the time the British took Havana in 1762. It was the British who made Havana a huge slave-trading center. To begin with, they brought in twelve hundred slaves to use in the siege of Havana, and after they took the city they established a slave market in which to sell them off. So although Cuban slave labor was used primarily in agricultural regions outside the city, the slave trade became centered in Havana.

  By the early nineteenth century, when the city was firmly back in Spanish control, it was generating an enormous amount of wealth. This was no longer due to treasures being shipped from Latin America to Europe, but to the slave trade and the growing sugar trade. The bigger the sugar market, the more sugar was produced, and the more slaves were needed to work the plantations. The most accepted estimate is that 65 percent of the slaves in Cuba worked in sugar production and another 15 percent in other forms of agriculture.

  The slaves literally had nothing. They were issued crude garments to wear. At harvest time, they worked sixteen hours every day. Many died from exhaustion, but the slave owners considered it cheaper to buy new slaves than to care for the ones already bought.

  The slave owners lived in extravagant mansions that can still be seen in Habana Vieja—some so large that they have been turned into hotels. The wealthy fretted over their luxuries, clothing, and jewelry and what to wear to dances and the theater. They attended concerts and operas, including a few by Havana-born composers and musicians of distinction. White people in Havana had one of the highest standards of living in the Americas. Their lives were full not only of European luxuries but also of American technology. Because of the needs of the sugar industry, Cuba had a railroad system, built with the help of American engineers, even before Spain did.

  Both slave and free black populations increased enormously in the nineteenth century. In 1790, Cuba had 153,559 whites, 64,590 slaves, and 54,151 “free people of color.” By 1869 there were 763,176 whites, 363,286 slaves, and 238,927 “free coloreds.”

  The slaves were off-loaded by the shipload in the Havana port where the sugar and tobacco were being on-loaded. They were then placed in conveniently located barracoons—one in town, and one out in the woodlands, near parks and outdoor recreation areas. The train that ran into Havana passed by the woodlands barracoon, and travelers could entertain themselves by looking out the window at the caged Africans. Since the Africans had never seen a train before, they were often terrified and flailed their arms in ways that the travelers found amusing. Families took carriage rides to view the Africans in their cages.

  Slavery revealed the barbarism behind the front of gentility. Sale days were not for family outings. The men who were prospective buyers were kept behind a locked door, listening to the wails and groans on the other side. Finally the door was opened and the men elbowed their way inside, struggling to grab as many “choice ones,” mostly naked men, as they could manage to hold by hand or rope.

  •

  An oddity in Spanish law, and one that had a huge impact on Havana, granted slaves the ability to buy their freedom. All slaves had a fixed value and could either purchase themselves outright or pay in installments, becoming part owners of themselves. It was a right guaranteed by law.

  Of course, “right” here is a murky term. To buy freedom, the slave had to have money, and earning money was not a guaranteed right of slaves. Slaves from the sugar fields had few opportunities to earn money, but in Havana there were many possibilities. Unlike the field slaves, the slaves who worked in households in Havana were predominantly women. Both male and female slaves in Havana could sell something on the street, including their bodies, which is how Havana became Cuba’s center of prostitution. There were many other commercial possibilities as well, including running a small shop.

  This resulted in three very important differences between Havana and the rest of Cuba. Havana had far more free blacks than any other part of the island. It also had more women. And it had far more people of mixed race, who were considered exotic—especially the women, las mulatas.

  The city’s economy depended on the labor of free blacks. Not only were cooks, tailors, launderers, and carpenters free blacks, but some of Havana’s most celebrated industries, such as shipbuilding and cigar making, depended on free black labor. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when cigar production became industrialized and quality “Havanas” became popular in Europe and North America, the rollers were mostly free blacks.

  The rest of Cuba had a shortage of women. The white men coming from Spain to seek their fortune often came without women. But there was a greater imbalance in the slave population. Most slaves were men who had been brought over between the ages of fifteen and twenty. Slave owners wanted slaves primarily for hard manual labor and, with the exception of the few women used as house slaves, mostly in Havana homes, did not want women.

  The ability of Havana house slaves to earn money on the side to buy their freedom was only one of the factors contributing to a large free black population in the city. Another was the tendency of slave owners to have sex with their female slaves. The sex was sometimes obtained by physical force, sometimes by intimidation, sometimes by promises of better living conditions, and sometimes by all three. If the union resulted in a child, the woman might be freed, though often she was sold as a wet nurse. But the child was automatically considered free.

  This also occurred on plantations, though there were fewer slave women there. And since no one would stay on a sugar plantation if they didn’t have to, freed blacks often drifted into cities. The great magnet was Havana, with its large free population, and so the city became known for its black population, its black culture. From music to religion to a distinct way of speaking, Havana has remained the center for African culture in Cuba.

  •

  At the end of the eighteenth century, the worst nightmare of slave owners everywhere occurred. The Haitian slaves rose up and overwhelmed their masters in a prolonged bloodbath that ended slavery there and drove white people out of Haiti. Many of the French planters who managed to escape relocated to Cuba, bringing with them horrifying stories.

  Cuba had its own history of slave rebellions. The 1533 Jobabo mine uprising had been only the beginning. In 1727, the slaves at the Quiebra Hacha plantation, just south of Havana, rose up, left the plantation with tools and firearms, and terrorized the surrounding area, plundering and killing. The rebellion was put down by a well-armed contingent of infantry from Havana.

  The reason Cuba remained a Spanish colony for more than a half-century longer than the rest of Latin America was that its slave owners wanted, and obtained, a Spanish military presence on the island. The slave owners were afraid of not only their slaves but also of Cuba’s many free blacks, who were more difficult to suppress than slaves were.

  Alexander von Humboldt, a noted Prussian geographer, made a number of trips to Cuba in the early nineteenth century. He observed with alarm that by 1825 the slave and free black populations were on their way to outnumbering the white population. “The free blacks, who may easily make common cause with the slaves, increase rapidly in Cuba,” he warned.

  Von Humboldt cautioned that the situation in Havana was particularly troubling, partly because free blacks from other parts of Cuba were drifting into the capital. He stated that in twenty years the white population of Havana had increased by 73 percent, whereas the “free colored” population had increased by 171 percent.

  The Cuban slave owners’ nightmare of a white bloodbath nearly happened. In 18
12, a free black from Havana, José Antonio Aponte, led a black uprising. He was a priest of the Yoruba spirit, Changó, who used African religion to spread his movement—something that whites had always suspected and feared would happen.

  Aponte’s uprising, occurring just eight years after the Haitian Revolution, invoked the names of that revolt’s leader, Toussaint Louverture, and the other heroes of Haiti. One of the organizers in eastern Cuba, Hilario Herrera, was actually a veteran of the Haitian Revolution.

  The uprising was island-wide; its goal was the abolition of slavery and ultimately the overthrow of Spanish rule. Revolts took place in Havana and most major cities, as well as on rural plantations. But Aponte was betrayed by disloyal followers and captured and hanged, along with eight others. After death, they were decapitated, and their heads were placed in cages around the city. One of Aponte’s hands was also displayed. “Mas malo que Aponte” (worse than Aponte) became a popular expression in Havana for doing something that was really bad.

  The fear continued, as did the slavery. In 1844, the Spanish government claimed to have broken a conspiracy known as La Conspiración de la Escalera (the Ladder Conspiracy), because many of the accused were tied to ladders and beaten. Thousands of slaves, free blacks, and mulatos were sent into exile, beaten, imprisoned, or executed, and it is still not clear whether an uprising actually had been planned or whether this was just an attempt by the government to crush the abolition movement.

  In 1817, the Spanish signed an agreement with the British to curtail the dangerous practice of importing Africans, but then the sugar market expanded, so slaves were smuggled in. Another treaty banning the importation of slaves was signed with the British in 1835, but the smuggling continued. By the mid-1800s, fifty thousand African slaves were being smuggled into Cuba every year. When the smugglers were caught at sea, they would simply toss their human cache overboard. With profits as high as 200 percent on a slave bought in Africa and sold in Havana, traders could afford to throw a few hundred away.

  FOUR

  Cecilia’s Fire and Sugar

  La complexión podía pasar por saludable, la encarnación viva, hablando en el sentido en que los pintores toman esta palabra, aunque a poco que se fijaba la atención, se advertía en el color del rostro, que sin dejar de ser sanguíneo, había demasiado ocre en su composición, y no resultaba diáfano ni libre. ¿A qué raza, pues, pertenecía esta muchacha?

  Her complexion could pass for healthy, with a ruddiness, speaking in the sense of this word used by painters, although once it was looked at closely, it could be seen that healthy glow aside, there was too much ocher in the color of her face, as a result of which her complexion was neither translucent nor free of other shadings. Then to what race did this girl belong?

  — CIRILO VILLAVERDE, Cecilia Valdés (1882)

  The free black population in Havana was about half women, sometimes even more than half women, because a woman slave was worth only a third of the value of a man, which made it much easier for women to buy their freedom. By contrast, women remained scarce in the countryside; slavers didn’t want pregnant women or babies, because they were not very productive.

  Havana became known as a city full of women—beautiful women. By extension, it is sometimes credited with beautiful men, but the emphasis has usually been on its women. In Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene comments, “To live in Havana was to live in a factory that turned out human beauty on a conveyor-belt.”

  What most attracts many Habaneros, at least according to them—they talk about this constantly—is that some of these women are, as they say, “muy atrás,” endowed with ample posteriors. References to this are ubiquitous not only in conversation and song lyrics but also in literature. In Edmundo Desnoes’s 1965 novel Inconsolable Memories, the narrator says, in seeming seriousness, “The S formed by the stomach and the ass reaches a point in certain Cuban women where it becomes independent, out of proportion with the rest of the body, even having its own personality.”

  Piropos, the catcalls men shout out at attractive women on Havana streets, are often odes to the ampleness of posteriors, how they are palaces, how they are revolutionary, how there is no shortage there—depending on what the political mood of the moment is. The woman’s response—amusement, embarrassment, anger—depends on her mood of the moment but when it is well-aimed social ­commentary, that is usually appreciated.

  Inevitably, the city with this kind of reputation for beautiful women became known for its sex industry. During colonial times, and again during post-independence dictatorships—especially under the 1952–1959 reign of Fulgencio Batista, who had strong American Mafia ties—prostitution grew into a hugely profitable enterprise, with rows of houses of ill repute, girlie shows at the downtown Shanghai Theater, and lots of cheesecake in the clubs. Until it was torn down shortly after the revolution, the Plaza del Vapor was a huge prostitute market.

  After Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, being slightly feminist, extremely prudish, and, besides, opposed to free enterprise, he tried to shut it all down. But in the more than half a century since he took power, the Cuban government has not succeeded in ending prostitution. It turns up wherever foreigners do, around certain hotels and certain restaurants, because many foreign men still dream of a night or even a few hours with an Habanera. Street pimps approach the foreigner and whisper, “Quieres una mu-la-ta?” In Havana street language, infamous for skipping syllables and dropping phonemes, the word mulata is three carefully enunciated syllables.

  Since at least the late eighteenth century, when slavery became large-scale, there has been a mystique about the mulata. Could there be a more typically Habanero myth than the legend that Havana cigars are rolled on the thighs of mulatas? In reality, they aren’t rolled on thighs; women were not even employed in cigar factories until 1877. The myth was started by a French journalist.

  The mystique of the mulata, rooted in the racism and sexism of the slave society, started with the fact that a mulata was someone who had never been a slave and, being half white, would have been considered a nearly full-fledged human being. The difference in the standings of a black woman and a mulata was reflected in nineteenth-century men’s slang. A mulata was called “a cinnamon,” something exotic and delicious; a black woman was called “a coal.”

  It may be that many people find people of mixed race to be attractive. The Spanish poet García Lorca said that Havana had the most beautiful women in the world and wrote that the reason was “owing to the drops of black blood that all Cubans carry.”

  But the Havana mulata also derived her reputation from her circumstance. Mulatas and mulatos, wanting to rise on the social ladder, had to be resourceful. In the 1950s, Cuban ethnographer Lydia Cabrera made a study of Cuban expressions that were modeled after African refrains. One was “Necessity is the father of the mulato.”

  A mulata was a woman with a higher social standing than a free black’s, but lower than a white’s. A person of mixed race was still a person of color, although one with more rights than a black. People of color were not accepted in certain jobs. They could not have the better seats at theaters and could not be seated at all in some restaurants. They were subject to petty humiliations, such as the omission of the title “Don” or “Doña” from their names on documents. Like most people in the middle of a social scale, people of mixed race attached great importance to moving up, and for mulatas, the key to this was white men. If a mulata had a child by a white man, that child would be a quadroon, which is the next-higher social position on the racist ladder.

  A crowd seems to swirl around an intriguing mulata in this illustration of a masked ball. The Graphic, June 24, 1876

  Wealthy white Habaneros who did not have qualms about marital infidelity knew that beautiful mulatas were available. It was something that everyone in Havana knew but about which they preferred not to speak. A wealthy scion of a sugar family might sleep with his mulata, bestow to her seemingly endless gifts, and even provide her with a good Havana ho
me, but if she demanded too much, he could get rid of her. So the mulata had to learn how to play her part carefully. She survived by being appealing.

  A popular nineteenth-century song, or guaracha, about a mulata begins, “Yo soy la reina de las mujeres”:

  I am the queen of women

  In this promised land.

  I am made of sugar and fire;

  I am the key to the heart.

  And then the refrain:

  I don’t know what I have here

  Nor what afflicts me.

  Ay, ay, ay!

  There is no cure for my sickness.

  I am the reason why men

  Don’t love their little white women.

  Because they die for certain parts of me,

  And I melt them with my warmth.

  •

  The best way to understand the culture of the mulata in nineteenth-century Havana is to read the great gift left to us by Cirilo Villaverde—his novel Cecilia Valdés.

  More than a generation older than Martí, Villaverde was born in 1812, the year of the Aponte slave uprising, in the western province of Pinar del Río. He was the son of a country doctor who lived on a sugar plantation, and in his early childhood he witnessed and was horrified by the brutality of plantation slavery. When he grew up, he moved to Havana, where he was educated and received a law degree while also starting a career as a writer. In 1848, when he became involved in a failed attempt to overthrow Spanish rule, he was arrested and sentenced to hard labor on a chain gang, but he managed to escape and settled in New York. There he lived and wrote for the rest of his life, more than forty years. He lived to see the end of slavery in Cuba but died in 1894, four years before the overthrow of the Spanish.