The Indigenous People of Cuba
The indigenous groups Columbus encountered in Cuba were of the Taino, Ciboney, and Guanahatabey tribes. Some had arrived on the island from Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and South Florida, and some from what is today Venezuela, between 1000 BCE and 1000 CE. As with the broad range of dates, there are some questions about their exact origins. Recent evidence suggests that historians mistakenly had described two of the groups as one: the Ciboney had been assumed to be related to the Guanahatabey tribe. However, it is now believed that they had separate identities and the Guanahatabey, whose language was never recorded, probably had distinct roots.7 One piece of evidence for this was that Columbus’s interpreter, a Taino from Hispaniola who learned Spanish after the 1492 expedition, could communicate with the Ciboney tribes but was unable to communicate with the Guanahatabey people he met during Columbus’s 1494 trip. The Tainos and Ciboney are usually described as Arawak Indians, and the Guanahatabey people as pre-Arawak, having arrived hundreds of years earlier.8
The Guanahatabey tended to live along the northern coast and on small keys offshore.9 They were less populous than the Ciboney, who lived mainly in coastal sections of western Cuba, subsisting on seafood. Their name translates in the Arawak language from the words for “cave” (siba) and “man” (eyeri).10 The Ciboney lived in established, stable communities and family groupings, and devised more sophisticated tools than those made by the Guanahatabey, enabling them, among other things, to construct wooden canoes.
The Tainos, originally from northern South America near Venezuela and Guyana, reached the northwestern Caribbean islands about 1,000 years before Columbus’s visit; they usurped land held by the other two tribes and pushed them further into western Cuba. The origins of the Taino have been subject to debate. They are usually described as being a branch of the Arawak Nation or having descended from the Arawaks, perhaps the most widespread clan of American aborigines.11 Scholars now say that they were as distinct as their different languages and cultures, and that the Arawak and Taino emerged from a common ancestor, then developed independently.12
While the indigenous groups that Columbus and his men met on Hispaniola were not all Taino, the Europeans used that name for all the people they encountered on Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Jamaica. The Taino, properly identified, were from the northern Caribbean, and their name means “good” or “noble,”13 distinguishing themselves from a small clan of aggressive Island-Caribs, who lived on the southern islands.
Taino culture was highly organized and hierarchical, with structured living and farming practices and a class division between nobles and commoners.14 Villages were characteristically built around a large square that served as a market where residents gathered for social events and recreation. In these common areas, they often used a ball and fashioned a rectangular court to play a game called batey.
The local cacique or chief had the best house and lived in a prime location fronting the village square; in turn, a cacique had assistants, behiques, who also functioned as priests or doctors. The rank of chief was inherited, and both men and women could rise to the post. Even though women generally had lesser standing than men, they did frequently serve as doctors and healers skilled in the use of medicinal herbs.
Class distinction extended beyond the tribe; the Taino looked down on members of the Ciboney tribes as being lower class, and sometimes used them as servants.15 Taino agricultural practices were technologically more advanced than those of other islanders, and included novel irrigation techniques, as well as mulching and enriching the soil to improve crop cultivation. Cassava root was a staple, and Taino farmers also grew sweet potato, squash, beans, peppers, and peanuts, as well as fruits, tobacco, and cotton. The cotton, in turn, was used to fashion fishing nets, as well as woven to make rope hammocks.
Many words in contemporary Spanish and even English come from the Taino, such as: aguacate (avocado), ají (garlic), guayaba (guava), guanábano (custard-apple tree), güiro (musical instrument made from a cornstalk), hamaca (hammock), and huracán (hurricane). The names of several Cuban cities—including Havana, Baracoa, Camagüey, and Bayamo—were derived from their prior Taino designations.
Spain Organizes Control Slowly
Despite an initial interest in Columbus’s conquests, Spain took its time to pursue the riches in these New World territories. It controlled the region via a permanent settlement that had been established on Hispaniola, where colonial rulers focused on the increasingly fierce opposition from local indigenous groups. Very quickly the indigenes had learned that the Spanish explorers were far from godlike.
By the early 1500s, the murder of the indigenous peoples had become widespread. It was evident, Bartolomé de las Casas observed, that the conquistadors sought gold for quick profit and hardly hesitated to cut down Indians who stood in their way. The Spaniards treated the Indians, he wrote, “as the most abject dung and filth of the Earth.”
Perhaps the most infamous early act of violence against the Indians was a massacre at Xaraguá in 1503, at the hands of Hispaniola’s first colonial leader, Nicolas de Ovando, who killed dozens of tribal chiefs, including a local Taino leader, Queen Anacaona. Las Casas, increasingly outraged by Spanish violence and treachery against the Tainos, reported that dozens of indigenous leaders and others died.
Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, who had come to the Caribbean with Columbus on the second voyage in 1493, was among the Spaniards who participated in the Xaraguá massacre.16 A rich Hispaniola landowner by 1509, Velázquez became known as an effective military commander and launched a series of genocidal attacks in response to Indian insurrections on Hispaniola. As Velázquez gained prominence, the Spanish crown sought to recover the concessions it had granted to Columbus, including his claim to control all of the West Indies.17 This was made easier by Columbus’s death in 1506 in Spain, apparently from a heart attack. He was about fifty-five years old, still convinced that his four explorations had been along the east Asian coast.
Spain’s King Ferdinand also wanted to establish administrative subdivisions over his newly acquired territories. To do this, he created regional outposts of the crown. Called audiencias, each was headed by an appointed royal governor. The king named Christopher Columbus’s son, Diego, governor of the first regional outpost at Hispaniola, giving him nominal control over Cuba as well as Hispaniola. To exercise that function and remove Diego’s rival from the local center of power, the king directed the younger Columbus to dispatch Velázquez to Cuba with a small army in order to establish a settlement there.
Strategically, Cuba was an excellent departure point for regional conquest.18 As early as 1513, Pedrarias Dávila sailed from Cuba in order to explore, subjugate, and settle Central America. Hernán Cortés’s voyage to Mexico left Cuba in 1519, and Hernando de Soto used Cuba as homeport for his exploration of Florida in 1538.
In all cases, gold fever was central to Spanish exploration. Early voyages led to the development of gold mines on Hispaniola, where Indians worked as slave laborers; the Spaniards assumed they would find just as much gold in Cuba. In fact, the conquistadors did discover gold in the central highlands and the Sierra Maestra shortly after establishing the settlement in Bayamo.19 But they quickly depleted Cuba’s gold reserves. Gold production peaked in 1519, when 112,000 pesos of gold were produced, the equivalent of about $132 million today.20 By the 1540s, Cuban gold generated only 3,000 pesos annually, far less than could be obtained from Hispaniola.21 With waning gold extraction, Cuba proved better as a waystation en route to further explorations for gold, and its importance as a colony declined.
Diego Velázquez arrived in January 1511 with 300 Spanish soldiers at what is today Guantánamo Bay. His outpost was at Baracoa, and he set up six more settlements between 1511 and 1515: at Bayamo, Trinidad, Havana, Puerto Príncipe (present day Camagüey), and Santiago de Cuba, staggered along the northern and southern Cuban coastline, and Sancti Spíritus,
which was located in the center of the island, about equidistant from the northern and southern shores. All were intended to play key roles in Spain’s expansion to Mexico, Central America, and South America.22
The Tainos Resist Spanish Domination
Velázquez’s progress was hampered at first by fierce attacks from the Gualaba Indians, a branch of the Taino.23 The Gualaba were led by Hatuey, a Taino chief who was thoroughly familiar with Spanish brutality. Hatuey had been present when Velázquez and his soldiers slaughtered Queen Anacaona and other Taino chiefs at Xaraguá eight years earlier. The chief evaded capture in that battle, at first retreating to the mountains in Hispaniola. He later made his way across the Windward Passage to Cuba with 400 Indian fighters.24
Hatuey resolved to destroy Velázquez and his colony in Cuba. Bartolomé de la Casas described his stirring speech to his assembled warriors before engaging in battle. He held up a basket of gold and jewels before them, de las Casas wrote, and said: “This is their [the Spaniards’] Lord,” he said. “This is what they serve.” In order to satisfy this idol, he exclaimed, “they will exact immense treasures from us, and will . . . reduce us to a miserable state of slavery, or else put us to death.”25
Hatuey’s warriors battled so fiercely that Velázquez was forced to call in reinforcements led by Pánfilo de Narváez, whose brutality in dealing with the Indians of Jamaica had already been documented. The battles raged for a year before Velázquez managed to defeat Hatuey’s warriors. Chief Hatuey himself was captured and burned at the stake on February 15, 1512.
The defeat of Hatuey—and his warning about the intentions of the Spaniards—presaged the virtual annihilation of the indigenous peoples of Cuba. When Velázquez landed in 1511, there were an estimated 100,000 indigenous people living in Cuba.26 By all accounts they were decimated—the population was 19,000 in 1519, and by midcentury fewer than 5,000 remained.27 Hatuey, nevertheless, has become a national hero whom Cubans hold up as a symbol of courageous resistance to foreign domination.
There were multiple reasons for the death of so many people in such a brief period, and some of the explanations are controversial. Clearly, many of the Tainos and others were killed in clashes with the Spaniards, including the yearlong battles with Hatuey and his men. But many more died off the battlefield. Cuban historians Eduardo Torres-Cuevas and Oscar Loyola Vega described the slaughter of two thousand Indians by Pánfilo de Narváez in 1511 as a “true genocide.”28 As many as one-quarter of the Indian population may have committed suicide by hanging themselves, eating dirt, or ingesting poison, rather than live under European subjugation while lamenting the loss of their traditional way of life.29 In their relentless search for riches, the Spaniards systematically subjugated and enslaved the Indians.30 Disease also was a factor in indigenous deaths. Smallpox epidemics in 1519 and 1530 killed many. Measles, typhoid, and dysentery wiped out whole villages.31 As mothers died, infant mortality increased with lack of necessary child care.32
Yet the Indian population was not extinguished completely. Some escaped to isolated islands off Cuba’s coast.33 Others fled to the mountains and were known as cimarrónes—runaway slaves. So many had died from all causes that by 1515, Velázquez began to import slaves from other Caribbean islands, from Central America, and the Yucatán. Within ten years, slaves outnumbered the indigenous population.34
The native culture also persisted, among other reasons, because of miscegenation. Among those women who survived, many married Spaniards and, later, blacks who were brought to Cuba as slaves. A 1514 census recorded that 40 percent of the Spanish men who reported being married had indigenous wives. Their mestizo children generally took the father’s Spanish name.35
Bartolomé de las Casas was the indigenes’ greatest defender, though his sermons were laced with more than a touch of paternalism and romanticism. He referred to the indigenous peoples, for example, as “sheep” and “indolent souls.” They were innocents and had greeted the Spaniards with reverence, he said, but eventually “were compelled to take up Arms, provoked thereunto by repeated Injuries, violent Torments, and injust (sic) Butcheries.”
His criticism provoked clerical and popular condemnation of Spanish colonial cruelty and did win some short-term results. With the death of King Ferdinand in 1516, his grandson Charles I reorganized the Council of the Indies, which oversaw the governance of Cuba and Hispaniola and had been blamed for the harsh Spanish treatment of the indigenous groups.36 A new set of laws sought to limit the exploitation of the indigenous population in the West Indies and end the encomienda system under which groups of indigenous people were granted to Spanish settlers as if they were property. However, in order to discourage Spaniards from leaving Cuba as its fortunes declined, the Spanish crown deferred implementation of the Leyes Nuevas on the island.37
Notes
1. Bartolomé de las Casas, A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (English version: London, Printed for R. Hewson at the Crown in Cornhil, near the Stocks-Market, 1689; non-paginated Kindle edition).
2. Columbus named the island “Juana,” for Don Juan, the son of his patrons, the Spanish regents, King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile; Geoff Simons, From Conquistador to Castro (New York: Macmillan, 1996), 70.
3. A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, chapter 1.
4. Simons, in From Conquistador to Castro, 81, says 18 ships.
5. Eduardo Torres-Cuevas and Oscar Loyola Vega, Historia de Cuba, 1492–1898, 3rd ed. (Havana: Editorial Pueblo y Educación, 2006), 43.
6. Simons, From Conquistador to Castro, 81.
7. Irving Rouse, The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 20.
8. Reniel Rodríguez Ramos, “From the Guanahatabey to the Archaic of Puerto Rico: The Nonevident Evidence,” Ethnohistory 55, no. 3 (2008): 394.
9. Torres-Cuevas and Vega, Historia de Cuba, 14–15.
10. Quoted in Richard Gott, Cuba: A New History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 12.
11. Torres-Cuevas and Vega, Historia de Cuba, 16.
12. Rouse, The Tainos, 5–9.
13. Rouse, The Tainos, 5.
14. Simons, From Conquistador to Castro, 68–69; Rouse, The Tainos, 9, 12, 14, 170.
15. Gott, Cuba, 12.
16. Gott, Cuba, 15.
17. Herbert S. Klein, Slavery in the Americas: A Comparative Study of Virginia and Cuba (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 17–18; Simons, From Conquistador to Castro, 85–87.
18. Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution, 5th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 23; Klein, Slavery in the Americas, 131.
19. Pérez, Cuba, 20.
20. Alejandro de la Fuente, Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 3. A peso, originally a “piece of eight,” was a coin that contained 27.47 grams of gold. With the price of gold at about $43 per gram in 2016, a peso would be worth about $1,181.
21. Pérez, Cuba, 20; Torres-Cuevas and Vega, Historia de Cuba, 157.
22. Estrella Rey Betancourt and César Garcia del Pino, “Conquista y colonización de la isla de Cuba (1492–1553),” in Historia de Cuba: La Colonia, ed. Maria del Carmen Barcia, Gloria Garcia, and Eduardo Torres-Cuevas (Havana: Instituto de Historia de Cuba, 1994), 84–85; Gott, Cuba, 20.
23. Rouse, The Tainos, 156; Torres-Cuevas and Vega, Historia de Cuba, 48.
24. Simons, From Conquistador to Castro, 86–87; Rouse, The Tainos, 56.
25. As quoted in Simons, From Conquistador to Castro, 86.
26. Torres-Cuevas and Vega, Historia de Cuba, 25.
27. Gott, Cuba, 20.
28. Torres-Cuevas and Vega, Historia de Cuba, 50.
29. Louis A. Pérez, Jr., To Die in Cuba: Suicide and Society (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005),
3–5.
30. Rouse, The Tainos, 157; Torres-Cuevas and Vega, Historia de Cuba, 157.
31. Pérez, Cuba, 22.
32. Torres-Cuevas and Vega, Historia de Cuba, 57–58.
33. Gott, Cuba, 22-23.
34. Rouse, The Tainos, 158.
35. Rouse, The Tainos, 158.
36. Miguel León Portilla and Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz, América Latina en la época colonial (Barcelona: Critica España, 2002), 202–3.
37. De la Fuente, Havana and the Atlantic, 3.
Chapter 2
Sugar and Slavery
The true story of my life does not begin until 1809, when destiny began to unleash itself against me with all its fury. For the least childish mischief, I was locked up for twenty-four hours in a coal cellar without floorboards and nothing to cover myself. I was extremely fearful and liked to eat. As one can still see, in order to distinguish an object in my cell during the brightest midday, a good candle was necessary. Here, after the suffering of brutal lashes, I was locked up with orders that anyone who might give me even a drop of water was to be severely punished. Such an order was so feared in that house that no one, absolutely no one, dared give me as much as a crumb even if there were an opportunity. . . . From the age of thirteen to fourteen, the joy and vivacity of my character and the eloquence of my lips, dubbed the “golden beak,” all changed completely into a certain kind of melancholy that, with time, became a personal trait of mine. Music enchanted me, but, without knowing why, I would cry. . . . I would cry rather than sob, but I was not faint of heart except during certain states of depression, incurable to this day.
Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence Page 2
