by Hugh Thomas
The British came to accept that they had some responsibility for suggesting a solution to this problem. Kilbee’s idea was that these Africans should be taken to Trinidad, now part of the British West Indies, where labor was short. Spain would pay for the journey there, each shipload would have to have an equal number of men and women, and a month’s notice was to be given. These conditions were difficult for the Cubans to fulfill, for few female slaves were ever brought to the “ever faithful isle” but, all the same, and under the impact of fear caused by an epidemic of cholera, about 1,100 such captives were sent, the fruit of British intervention against five ships during the years 1833-35.
By now, even in the imperial dictatorship which Cuba had become, there were dissentient voices. José Verdaguer, a Catalan judge in Havana for nine years, shared most of the British views. Then, in 1830, a prize essay by Pedro José Morillas suggested that white labor was as effective as black. Several well-known sugar planters, such as the Aldamas and the Alfonsos, tried out the idea. There were a number of candidates: Gallegos, for example, who might be attracted by Cuba’s relatively high level of living; Canary Islanders, contracting to work for a specified number of years only; Irishmen, who would soon work on the railways; and, above all, Chinese, who had first been seen in the West Indies in Trinidad as early as 1806.
Captains-general in Havana changed, but their policies remained the same. Thus General Vives was succeeded by General Ricafort, who survived only a year before giving way to General Miguel Tacón, in 1834. Tacón, the most remarkable individual to govern Cuba in the early nineteenth century, was, as Vives had been, a veteran of the wars against Spanish American independence. In the course of many terrible marches and countermarches in the tropics, he had learned to despise the criollos in South America. He looked on them as illogical, self-centered, brutal, lazy, and narrow-minded. The death of his wife had made him misanthropic. In Spain, he had sided with the constitutional revolution of Riesgo, and he owed his appointment in Havana to the liberal statesman Martínez de la Rosa (in respect of whom the historian Raymond Carr wrote, “Liberty was no longer a furious bacchante, but a sober matron”). But in Cuba, Tacón conducted himself, as did most similar generals, autocratically and ruthlessly, interested in making money where he could, and supporting the slave trade. “Servile in Spain, tyrannical in Cuba,” was the comment of the writer whom he exiled, José Antonio Saco. Tacón was said to receive half an ounce of gold per slave safely landed and, in his four years of government, he was rumored to have gained 450,000 pesos. Tacón was bitterly anti-British, hated the United States, feared Methodists and Baptists as revolutionaries, and even despised railways as “Anglo-Saxon ironwork.”
George Villiers, the British Minister in Madrid, told the Spanish Foreign Minister that he knew “the slave trade in Cuba has never been so prevalent as since the period when the present Captain-General was appointed. . . . the persons engaged . . . appear to be acting in the full confidence not only of escaping with impunity but almost of meeting with open protection.”16
Tacón saw abolitionism in truth as the real threat to the island and thought that, in those circumstances, no concessions on political liberty could be made. His secret agent, Captain José Ruiz de Apodaca (whose hatred of Britain was due to having been captured at Trafalgar), went to Jamaica and “confirmed” that Britain was training Methodists as agents to destroy Cuba by inspiring a rebellion of slaves. Two prominent slave dealers, Joaquín Gómez and Francisco Martí y Torres, became not just Tacón’s chief advisers but his best friends. The Captain-General charged the latter with the sale of emancipados. He and his friends devised a Cuban version of Gogol’s Dead Souls: when a slave died (and 10 percent a year did so), an emancipado was often given his name and his place. The price of an emancipado in 1836 was a third the price of a slave. In these years, the governors of British islands, such as Trinidad, were crying out for the Cuban emancipados to be sent to them, but Tacón had found a better use for them. When Tacón left for home, the merchants of Havana appropriately presented him with a seven-foot black footman in token of their gratitude.
Captain-General Tacón was assisted in his support of the slave trade by a clever and charming official, the United States consul in Havana, Nicholas Trist, who had arrived in Havana in 1833, having previously been secretary to Thomas Jefferson, whose granddaughter he had married. He helped the Cuban slavers by making United States registration, and hence flags, easily available to all their ships—and by being distinctly unhelpful to Judge Kilbee of the Mixed Court at Havana. Trist owned property in Cuba. He poured out his prejudiced views to the British commissioners in an “extraordinary” memorandum, in Palmerston’s expression. His conduct was investigated by a United States minister in Madrid, Alexander Everett, and he was condemned, and later dismissed. All the same, he would be President Polk’s emissary to Mexico in 1848 and draw up the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.17
Trist must have been responsible for securing the entry of a great many slaves into Cuba. Kilbee’s successor as British judge at the mixed court of arbitration in Sierra Leone, Henry Macaulay, son of Zachary and a brother of the historian, told a House of Commons committee that, in 1838 and 1839, there were about thirteen ships which he thought “were not American . . . but [which sailed] under the American flag, and with American papers, supplied to them by American authority,” almost always in Havana. “The whole thing,” said Macaulay, “was a complete fraud. . . . In some cases the vessels that were boarded one day by the cruisers under the American flag were boarded afterwards with the Portuguese or Spanish flag hoisted, and full of slaves.”18 But sometimes, the traders were avowedly United States citizens such as James Woodley of Baltimore who collaborated with a compatriot, William Baker, a resident of Cuba, in the dispatch of slave ships such as La Cintra (with a French captain) in 1819.
Some, perhaps many, of the slaves helped into Cuba by Trist were afterwards carried to the new independent Republic of Texas, still an ideal place for disembarking slaves intended for the United States slave market in New Orleans. (North American settlers in Texas had pursued independence partly in order to reinstate slavery, abolished by Mexico in 1829.) Tolmé, the British consul in Havana, in 1837 thought that 1,500 slaves might have been secretly carried to Texas in the previous few years.
But for the masters of Cuba, the era between 1820 and 1865 renewed, as the Countess Merlin put it, “the charms of the golden age.” There were some remarkable town houses, theaters, and hotels in which balls, bullfights, and even goosefights were held.19 In October 1840, Hunt’s Merchant Magazine and Commercial Review declared that Cuba was “the richest colony in the world.” The island in the 1840s was producing two-thirds more sugar than the entire British West Indies, and twice as much as Brazil. Speculation in property was even greater than that in slaves. Immigration by adventurous merchants and gamblers was continuous from all countries, from Venezuela as well as from the United States, and above all from Spain. Nor was the life of slaves always as grim as it was on the sugar plantations. For example, Edouard Corbière, in his novel Le Négrier, published in 1832, says: “These blacks, fat and portly, lazy and jolly, whom I saw joking all day in the streets seemed much happier than our workers in Europe and than most sailors. . . .”20 A picture of the life of slaves in Havana in the late 1830s was given by “Fanny” Calderón de la Barca, who with her husband, the first Spanish minister to Mexico, stopped in Havana on their way to their designated legation. As well as recording dinners at which she was offered 350 dishes, by beautiful countesses dressed in satin, she was fascinated by the “little black boys, like juvenile apes, their arms folded, standing behind the chairs” in spacious Spanish-style town houses, on marble floors. She loved, too, the French beds with blue silk drapery, attended by slave girls, dressed in white mantillas and white satin shoes. Two black orchestras might play Mozart and Bellini alternately in the moonlightX and, in front of the ocean, the guests would drink champagne from golden cups. There might then be h
eard “that continuous hiss [with] which the languishing habañera calls upon her ebony attendants so that the uninitiated might imagine himself suddenly transported amidst a sea of serpents.”21
Among these charming people, and in these beautiful houses, listening perhaps to “The Last Rose of Summer” played on the harp, there would be men who had made their fortunes, not just on sugar plantations but from trading in slaves: for example, that “very civil and good-natured” giant, the count of Reunión, who had been, before his ennoblement in 1824, none other than the famous and innovatory slaver, Santiago de la Cuesta y Manzanal. Fanny Calderón was entertained lavishly by the count of Fernandina (the word for Cuba in the early sixteenth century), whose wife seemed “full of revolutionary and reformatory projects,” even if her jewels were worth $300,000, while her husband’s sugar and coffee plantation, La Angosta, was among the most successful of all. All believed that their slaves were fortunate; indeed, sometimes they must have been. For example, at a ball of the Fernandinas, the Calderóns were “amused to see numbers of negroes and negresses helping themselves plentifully to sweetmeats, uncorking and drinking fresh bottles of champagne, and devouring everything on the supper tables, without the slightest concern for the presence of either master or mistress.” The countess of Fernandina, it seemed, had just offered an old slave his freedom, and he had refused it, to become later the master of other slaves in the household.22 When the equally charming, equally epistolary Countess Merlin, another traveler but Cuban-born,XI returned home to Havana after many years in Paris in 1840, she found herself immediately surrounded by black African slaves and servants, as well as cousins: “At last there arrive the blacks and their ladies, happy, affectionate, each presenting their right to look at me. This one had brought me up, that one had played with me, a third had used to make my shoes. Each of them owed their liberty to the care they had devoted to me in my childhood.” Then came her nanny: “And then, voilà, in front of me, the good old woman, sitting on the best armchair in my room, her hands on her knees, head held high, devouring me with her eyes and replying to every question which I put to her about members of her family . . . .”23 But, of course, all these were domestics, not workers on plantations. The comments reminded us that there was as big a difference between black Cubans as there was between them and white ones.
The slave trade seemed in these days essential to this island: it was taken for granted that the way to the wealth to which all aspired was to cultivate more and more land, and that could only be done by slaves. Despite Morillas’s prize essay, European labor was considered impractical and less reliable. It was also thought in Spain that an increase in the black population would make it certain that the Cuban criollos would remain faithful to the mother country, since the planters would have to rely on Spanish armies to deter, and if necessary defeat, a slave revolt.
As in Brazil, the slave merchants dominated the economy. Also as in Brazil, men from the madre patria played a large part in this illegal stage of the commerce. Thus there was Joaquín Gómez, whom we have met before as a friend of General Tacón, a Freemason from Santander, who rejoiced in the inappropriate Masonic name of Aristides. Perhaps it was of him that the Reverend Abbot was speaking when he described the typical Havana merchant as arriving from Spain “in poverty, [they] begin with a shop six or eight feet square, live on a biscuit, and rise by patience, industry and economy to wealth and, unlike the Yankees, never fail.”24 In the mid-1820s, Gómez was not only the pioneer of illegal trading from Africa, but was also one of the first Spanish-born slave merchants to buy sugar mills (two of them, in the western province of Pinar del Río) which he would himself provide with slaves. He was later a founder-director of the first bank in Cuba, the Royal Bank of Ferdinand VII, and was the first Cuban planter to introduce iron rollers imported from England for use in his mills. Captain-General Vives asked him to organize the distribution of freed slaves in Cuba, the emancipados. Gómez’s palace, at the corner of the Calle Obispo and the Calle Cuba, was the site of legendary receptions. In the 1830s, he became the special confidant of Tacón, with whom he would be seen daily walking, deep in conversation about the iniquities of the United States and the hypocrisy of the British. Gómez’s slave vessels were still setting off for Africa in the 1840s. Late in his life, he was blinded by a deranged doctor from Catalonia, a certain Verdaguer, who threw vitriol in his face when he was leaving church: the vengeance of God for his slaving activities, it was said. All the same, when he died in 1860, and despite his Masonic ties, Gómez left money to the Church for its distribution to the poor, including enough for the purchase of a new organ for the cathedral. His nephew and heir, Rafael de Toca Gómez, became first count of San Ignacio, was a founder of the Banco Español (when the son of that nobleman died in 1881, he left a great fortune of 183 million reales).
Associated with Gómez was a Gaditano, Pedro Blanco, whose activities in Africa will be discussed later,XII and whose nephews, Fernando and Julio, would carry on their own substantial slave trafficking, in Havana, sometimes carrying slaves to New Orleans, and becoming specialists in the swift interchange of flags which was such a necessary part of the commerce in mid-century. Then, in the 1850s, they turned themselves into respectable London general merchants, with interests in both Liverpool docks and Manchester textiles.
Another formidable slaver in Cuba of the early nineteenth century was the Catalan Francisco Martí y Torres. He had fought for a time in the peninsular war alongside the guerrillero Marqués de Romana, but reached Havana as early as 1810, where he embarked on a career as a pirate in the agitated Caribbean. A Cuban Vautrin, he eventually found employment as a naval lawyer concerned to punish smuggling, a sinecure in which he placed himself at the orders of Joaquín Gómez, using his position to make a fortune from receiving bribes from the slave traders whom he was theoretically intended to control. He soon began to send slave ships himself to Africa and, like Gómez, helped to manage the sale of emancipados on behalf of Tacón. Later, he organized the dispatch (as well as the kidnapping) of innumerable Yucatec Mayas to work in Cuba, including children, in conditions tantamount to slavery; at the same time, he received honors for capturing pirates, he became a philanthropist and, on behalf of Tacón, he built a theater, whose grandeur rivaled all others in the Americas at the time.25
Though Martí died a multimillionaire, his fortune was surpassed by that of Juan Manuel de Manzanedo, a native of Santoña, in northern Spain, who emigrated to Cuba in 1823. By 1845, he had already amassed vast wealth, partly in providing sugar equipment to mills, partly by making loans, partly by selling sugar in Spain and England, and partly in financing slaving expeditions. He was a member of all the important institutions of Cuba, such as the Tribunal de Comercio and the Junta de Fomento (Development Commission). He returned to Spain, bought property in Madrid near the Puerta del Sol, acted as Cuba’s representative in that capital, and became a deputy, a marquis, and then a duke (of Santoña). His services to the restored Bourbon monarchy after 1876 did not prevent him from acquiring a collection of 138 pictures, among them two Velázquezes, two Goyas, and a Leonardo, all to be seen on the walls of his palace in the Calle Principe. Manzanedo died worth about 180 million reales, most of which sum was then invested in Spain.26
Julián Zulueta, a Basque from the tiny village of Barambio in Alava, Spain, was an even more powerful merchant. At the end of the 1820s, Zulueta came to Cuba to work for an uncle, Tiburcio de Zulueta, who owned coffee farms. Julián Zulueta became his heir and seems to have dropped the particule. He married Francisca, niece of his partner, the slaver Salvador Samá y Martí, who had become marquis of Marianao. In the 1830s, Zulueta also became interested in slaves, partly because of his wife’s family, but more because of the interest of another uncle, Pedro Juan Zulueta de Ceballos, a successful London merchant, for whom he, Julián, had acted as the Cuban agent. Later, he became the slaver-planter par excellence of Cuba, ensuring, like Gómez, that slaves for whose journey he himself had arranged would be
delivered direct from Africa to one of his properties, such as his large sugar plantation, the Alava, the name of the Basque province whence he came. Zulueta was the originator of the scheme to make up for the shortage of labor in Cuba with Chinese, from Macao, and he also financed the Caibarién Railway. He had too an office for the purchase and sale of slaves in New Orleans. He both lent money and made sugar on a large scale. He probably brought into Cuba most of the 100,000 or so slaves imported in the years 1858 to 1862.
At that time, Zulueta was the chief shareholder in a company, the “Expedición por Africa,” which owned about twenty ships. One of these was the Lady Suffolk, which disembarked 1,200 slaves in the Bay of Pigs in May 1853.XIII Zulueta received them in person, though he sold some of them to his coplanter and fellow slaver, José Baró, marquis of Santa Rita, owner of the Luisa and Rita mills, respectively the seventh- and ninth-best mills of Cuba, who controlled the manufacture and supply of the molds used in Cuban sugar manufacture.
The British consul denounced the affair of the Lady Suffolk, and the then mildly humanitarian captain-general, General Cañedo, ordered the arrest of Zulueta. That great merchant was in consequence detained for two months in the most disagreeable fortress of La Cabaña, and only released on the appeal of his doctor. Despite this, honors fell to Zulueta in later life, since he led the Spanish interests on the island during the civil war which began in Cuba in the late 1860s. Zulueta became a senator for life in Madrid, and a marquis. When he died, he was worth 200 million reales, a fortune which made him the richest man in both Spain and the Spanish empire, unless the landed wealth of the old aristocratic families of Andalusia is reckoned. The correspondent of the Times (of London), a repentant revolutionary, A. N. Gallenga, sometime secretary to the Italian revolutionary Manzini, described Zulueta as “a king of men . . . almost the father of the gods and of men . . . another Cosimo de’ Medici.”27 There continues to be a street named after Zulueta in Havana: his Alava sugar mill also survives; but he himself seems quite forgotten.
