Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence

by Philip Brenner

  —Excerpt from a slave’s diary, 18401

  Decline and Resurgence of Cuba’s Importance to Spain’s Empire

  Half a century after Columbus first visited Cuba, the island’s gold reserves were depleted, and Cuba had become less desirable than many other Spanish settlements in the Caribbean. Settlers in Cuba migrated with the Spanish explorers to Mexico and South America where they found significant new supplies of gold.2 A Cuban census of six cities in 1544 counted 1,749 people; only 112 were Spanish. A 1620 estimate placed Cuba’s total population at less than 7,000.3 For decades the small settlements of Cuba used Indians and African slaves to develop cattle, grow food crops, and cultivate sugar cane, which had been imported to Cuba from the Canary Islands in 1515.4

  Early on, Cuba exported these supplies to other Caribbean colonies. But as the new colonies became self-sufficient, Cuban exports were no longer required. By the mid-1550s, many Cuban settlements had vanished: “Fields were unattended, mines were deserted, towns were abandoned,” historian Louis Pérez recounts.5 Even the colonial capital, Santiago de Cuba, had been reduced to little more than a hamlet with thirty households.6

  With labor in short supply, the first African slaves were brought in as early as 1511 to supplement continuing agricultural labor needs. Few European settlers had remained, and the majority of indigenous people had died from new diseases or battles with the conquerors. Less than a few thousand Indians survived, and between 1520 and 1540, Cuba lost 80 percent of its Spanish population.7 In 1532, there were approximately five hundred African slaves on the island. Three years later, their number had doubled. A 1544 census found the African population was almost as large as the Spanish, 29 and 35 percent, respectively.8 In a 1606 count, there were twenty thousand Africans.9

  It took several decades for Cuban commerce and colonial life to rejuvenate itself. Eventually, Cuba emerged as a gateway and a new staging ground for Spanish exploration north, toward Florida and beyond. San Cristobal, on the island’s southern coast along the eastern part of the Gulf of Batabanó, was Cuba’s first major port. It had become a convenient departure point for the Spanish conquistadors, such as Hernán Cortés, who departed from there on his 1519 foray into Mexico during which he conquered the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. As Mexico became a major source of gold and commodities for the Spanish crown, other plunderers recognized San Cristobal’s usefulness as a gateway.

  Ironically, the exploitation of Mexican wealth led to the rise of Havana. Its location offered an important strategic advantage—it had a natural port that could serve ship commerce and offer protection from attack. In the 1520s, settlers began to migrate north from San Cristobal. Stopping at a site along the Almendares River, close to what is now Havana harbor, they named the new town San Cristobal de la Habana.10

  The new port emerged as a trade center fairly quickly after its founding. Havana became the key stopover for travelers seeking to restock their supplies or for carousing before and after long, solitary sea voyages. By 1532, it was the most convenient first stop for ships arriving from Europe or last stop for ships heading back across the Atlantic laden with cargo from other colonies. Havana was also the last port from which ships departed without an escort to protect them from pirates and Spain’s European antagonists during several sixteenth-century wars. The discovery of the Gulf Stream—first described by Juan Ponce de Leon, who was a crew member on Columbus’s second voyage to America—added to the advisability of using Havana as a departure point. Mariners realized that by plying the waters off Havana, the northeastern flow of the Atlantic current cut down sailing time for ships heading home to Europe.

  The Origins of the Name “La Habana”

  After his first trip to Cuba, Christopher Columbus wrote to his Spanish backers that “there are in the western part of the island two provinces which I did not visit; one of these is called by the Indians ‘Avan,’ and its inhabitants are born with tails.”* “When Spanish soldier-settlers finally reached and conquered the western part of the island some twenty-five years after Columbus’s voyage, they were still calling it ‘La Avana’ or ‘La Abana,’ a name which they took from a word often repeated by the inhabitants, a word recorded by the Spaniards as Havaguanex or Habaguanex, which they thought to be the name of a local chief.”† Writing shortly afterward about the harbor where the Spanish settlers finally located the city of La Habana, Father Bartolomé de las Casas, the chronicler of the Spanish destruction of native culture in the Caribbean, said, “There are few harbors in Spain, and perhaps not in any other parts of the world, that may equal it.”‡

  * * *

  * As quoted in Cluster and Hernández, The History of Havana, 1.

  † Cluster and Hernández, The History of Havana, 2.

  ‡ As quoted in Cluster and Hernández, The History of Havana, 2.

  As early as 1546, one writer characterized Havana as one of the “most important and famous cities in the world.”11 Its formal crowning as Cuba’s center of power came in 1553, when King Charles I of Spain designated the city as the new capital, replacing Santiago de Cuba. Until then, most of Havana’s thriving businesses had revolved around transportation and related services—shipyards, slaughterhouses, produce markets—that provisioned ships traveling back and forth to Europe.12 Taverns that lodged clothing suppliers also developed, accompanied by thriving side pursuits: prostitution, gambling, and the production and consumption of alcohol.

  With its new importance, security issues grew. As early as Cortés’s exploration of Mexico, Spanish fleets and settlements were subject to periodic attacks by pirates and marauders supported by France, Spain’s principal European rival in the early sixteenth century. Havana itself was a frequent target for attack by French marauders, and in 1537 a French fleet occupied the city for nearly a year.13 After Spain won back control, authorities began to build fortifications to defend settlers from future attacks. The first fortress, the Castillo de la Real Fuerza, was more a symbolic structure than a meaningful battlement. Poorly located, it had been built too far into the mouth of Havana harbor to serve as an early warning site against attacks.

  That became all too evident in 1555 when the French pirate Jacques de Sorés sacked and effectively destroyed the city. Free Indians and African slaves fought the French onslaught alongside Spanish settlers. But they were no match for de Sorés’s superior force, which then withdrew before the residents could summon assistance from other Cuban garrisons.

  Charles I responded to the devastating raid with a plan that included the construction of more substantial fortifications throughout Cuba. Yet only in 1589, more than thirty years after de Sorés’s raid, did the Spanish crown finally authorize the construction of Havana’s first significant and defensible fortress—Morro Castle (Castillo de los Tres Reyes Magos del Morro)—which was built strategically at the point where the harbor meets the sea.14 Havana’s defense remained far from perfect, though, as the English Royal Navy captured Morro Castle in 1762 and held it until the following year.

  Spain built fortresses similar to Morro Castle in Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, and Cartagena. Yet the colonies were not always able to withstand attacks by pirates, notably those supported by Britain, which had been engaged in an undeclared war with Spain even before the attack on the Spanish Armada in 1588. The most famous and feared among the English pirates and privateers of the period was Sir Francis Drake, who plundered Spanish settlements throughout the Caribbean and Spanish commercial ships at sea. Still, the attacks were not enough to weaken Spain’s ability to transfer huge stocks of minerals and produce home.15

  The Emergence of the Sugar Economy

  Cuba Is a Late Bloomer in Producing Sugar

  By 1600, Havana was firmly established as Cuba’s central city. With a population of 9,000 inhabitants—about 46 percent of the island’s total—Havana was the hub for its commerce. Increasingly, the city also had become a regi
onal center for the defense of the empire.16 Yet Cuba’s importance to the Spanish empire would remain principally as a service station for the rest of the colonies. It was not a source of commodities, as the island’s vast territory was given more to raising cattle than to agriculture. Only in the eighteenth century would the introduction of sugar plantations transform the island’s economy and its political future.

  Sugar had been introduced into Cuba from either Jamaica or Hispaniola in the early 1500s, but the processes for growing, harvesting, and milling cane were primitive and yields were small. The Spanish crown provided little investment to develop the island’s capacity for sugar production, choosing to focus its resources elsewhere. While Hispaniola had six sugar mills and forty under construction by 1520 and Jamaica had thirty operating sugar mills in 1523, Cuba’s first sugar mills were not built until 1576.17 Until then the small sugar crop was used mainly to make molasses concentrate, most of which was consumed on the island itself.18

  With the emerging industrial age in the mid-1700s, the Spanish colonial government sought new sources of raw materials and produce.19 For the first time, Cuba was viewed as a potential source of agricultural products. Slowly, farms were established for growing and exporting cotton as well as coffee, which in particular was well suited to the western mountainous province of Pinar del Rio. This incipient agricultural industry was still limited by primitive methods and small farming operations. But to the degree that export products emerged, cattle production decreased.

  British control of Cuba for a little less than one year also contributed to the rise in agricultural exports and a decrease in Spanish mercantile control. In 1762, near the end of the so-called Seven Years’ War, a conflict pitting France and Spain against Britain, a British expeditionary fleet laid siege to western Cuba and seized Havana. British entrepreneurs descended on the city, prompting a new drive for sugar production and a surge in slave trading. More than 10,000 slaves arrived in Havana during the ten months of British control. The occupation ended with the 1763 Treaty of Paris, under which British negotiators ceded control of Cuba in return for sovereignty over Florida. Short-lived though it was, the British influence accelerated the transformation of the island’s economy and culture. As Louis Pérez aptly concludes, “If the availability of new markets made the expansion of sugar profitable, the availability of new slaves made it possible.”20

  Industrialization of Sugar Production

  In this way, two centuries after its introduction on the island, sugar began its expansion until it became king, with the Cuban economy restructured into a monoculture organized around the harvesting and processing of cane on large plantations. The restructuring was accelerated by steadily growing demand in Europe and North America, along with one landmark event: the 1804 Haitian revolution. Culminating a thirteen-year slave rebellion, Haiti’s declaration of independence provoked European and North American boycotts of Haitian commerce and products, actions intended to punish the victors and to discourage slave revolts in the Caribbean and the United States. Meanwhile, French refugees from Haiti headed to Cuba, bringing with them expertise in streamlined sugar refining methods. Buyers turned increasingly to Cuba, which accordingly increased sugar production. Between 1792 and 1806 the number of sugar mills around Havana nearly doubled to 416. Large swaths of forest—13,000 acres annually in the 1840s—were destroyed to make way for sugar cultivation.21 The new emphasis on sugar production highlighted the need to reform agricultural and milling practices, as well as land tenancy laws, to remove obstacles to the creation of large plantations. In this way sugar production became more “rational.” As mills were vertically integrated with the production of cane, plantation owners were able to afford the introduction of newer technologies and the entire process became more efficient.22

  Major sugar planters promoted increased acreage and modern innovation and established a chapter of the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País (the Economic Society for Friends of the Country), a Spanish organization with branches throughout the colonies aimed at promoting economic development. The Cuban branch also focused on its members’ desire to continue using slaves for the sugar harvest at a point when slavery was being abolished elsewhere.

  The resulting agricultural transformation advanced in stages and changed Cuba in several ways. By the 1860s, sugar provided 80 percent of Cuba’s exports. Tobacco was about 10 percent of exports; coffee was 2 percent.23 Meanwhile, Cuba became less able to provide food and basic necessities for its inhabitants and began to rely on imports that could be purchased with its export income.24 Farming focused on cash crops rather than the production of food for internal consumption. The conversion to a sugar export economy also moved Cuba toward a “special” and unbalanced relationship it already had been developing with the United States, which offered an expanding market vastly more accessible and convenient than any other trading partner. By the middle of the nineteenth century, 62 percent of Cuba’s exports went to the United States and only 3 percent was shipped to Spain. But 30 percent of Cuba’s imports came from Spain, with only 20 percent coming from the United States.25

  A Dual Slavery System

  As Cuba’s plantation economy flourished so did growth in its African slave trade. The custom of using African slave labor in Europe predated Columbus’s voyage to America by almost half a century,26 and Spanish settlers in Cuba did not hesitate to use West African slaves to fulfill their labor needs. Between 1790 and 1820 at least 300,000 slaves were sent to Cuba, triple the total in the previous 280 years.27 This trafficking in humans reflected a cold calculation of profit and loss, because slave ownership was a significant investment for a landowner.28 Prior to the rise of sugar, costs often outweighed gains. In 1610, the mean price of a slave was 203 ducats, in purchasing power the equivalent of 185 cattle hides or 140 loads of cassava.

  Part of the calculus in buying and maintaining slaves was a brutal reality: it was sometimes less expensive for slave owners to buy a new slave than to keep existing slaves healthy enough to have children who could also be enslaved. As a consequence, Cuban slave owners gave little consideration to the survival of their African laborers. Louis Pérez explains that “Africans consigned to sugar production toiled under execrable circumstances. Tens of thousands of men and women were worked remorselessly: six days a week, eighteen hours a day, often for five and six months at a time. . . . The death of slaves was passed off as a depreciation of capital stock—all in all, an acceptable cost of doing business.”29 Annual slave mortality rates, due to illnesses and inhumane treatment, were as high as 18 percent at some mills. Life expectancy for a slave averaged seven years after arriving in Cuba.30

  In many other colonies, slave trading was on the decline. Britain abolished the practice throughout the empire in 1807, and the US Constitution forbade the importation of slaves after 1808. Cuban slave shipments continued well into the 1800s and Cuba became a source for illegal slave sales to North America.

  The depiction of a relentlessly oppressive system of slavery in Cuba is complicated by the treatment of Africans who were not on sugar plantations.31 Although slavery was still functioning in the 1800s, the Spanish legal code did not support slavery, and those who had been slaves did not suffer the same stigma experienced by freed men and women in the United States.32 Historian Herbert Klein notes that “while slavery was accepted as a historic institution . . . it was conceived of as an evil necessity rather than a positive good.”33

  Africans were employed freely in nearly every aspect of production and commerce on the island, partly due to the scarcity of white laborers. In Cuban towns, Africans had jobs and sometimes owned property. A majority of the taverns and lodges in Havana, for example, were owned or managed by African women. Those Africans in the cities who were slaves tended to have considerable independence, in stark contrast to rural slaves. Moreover, slaves had limited legal recognition and the right to own and inherit property apart from what a master might be willing to a
llow a slave to possess. Slaves could even “rent themselves” out to individual employers, and would then pay a portion of their earnings to their owners. And if they gathered enough money from their employment, urban African slaves in Cuba also could purchase their freedom. Eventually a growing cadre of African freedmen and freedwomen were working alongside slaves in urban areas.

  The prevailing attitude toward Africans in Cuba gave them a significant role in Spanish colonial aspirations in the Caribbean. By 1770, blacks and mulattos made up more than one-fourth of Cuba’s militia.34 As Spain and Britain fought for power in Europe, Spain depended on the Cuban militiamen to challenge British holdings in the Western Hemisphere, which gave black Cuban militiamen “some acquaintance with the rhetoric of independence,” as historian Jane Landers observes. One battalion even fought under a flag bearing the words, “Victory or Death,” similar to Patrick Henry’s, “Give me liberty or give me death.”35 Notably, Cuban leaders adopted the same theme in the 1960s: Patria o Muerte, Venceremos (Homeland or Death, We Will Be Victorious).

  The first major slave revolt erupted on the estate of Cuatro Compañeros in 1795. Its timing was significant. News of the uprising in Haiti, which began two years earlier, had crossed the Windward Passage. The ringleader at Cuatro Compañeros was José el Francés, who appeared to have been Haitian. Fear of Haitian influence led Cuban captain-general Jesus de las Casas to prohibit correspondence with foreigners, and in 1796 to ban the importation of French-speaking slaves.36