However, word of the successful 1804 Haitian revolution was unstoppable. Tension increased on Cuban plantations as the large numbers of Africans swelled the ranks of slaves after 1808. Talk of rebellion spread quickly from Cuba to other parts of the Caribbean, since the island was a regional and international transportation hub.37 And then in 1812, as if a growing balloon finally burst, the tension exploded in the Aponte Rebellion.38
Named for José Antonio Aponte, a moreno (free black) sculptor who had been a captain in the free black militia, the rebellion was a series of separate slave insurrections throughout the island. The first one, in January 1812, took place on plantations surrounding Puerto Príncipe, nearly 400 miles from Havana, and was the result of coordinated planning. In suppressing this plantation revolt, the colonial government decided to set a brutal example to discourage further unrest. Fourteen African rebels were executed in a public square, while 170 slaves and free blacks were whipped and imprisoned.39
A month later, a series of revolts were staged around Bayamo, in Cuba’s eastern province of Oriente, about sixty miles west of Santiago. Revolts next spread to plantations near Holguín and Havana. As the colonial government fought to suppress the Havana plantation rebellions, they tortured slaves in an attempt to gather information. As several slaves asserted that Aponte was the leader of the rebellions, he became the government’s prime target, even though he actually was not a central figure. In fact, the island-wide insurrection was neither orchestrated nor coordinated by one central command. Nevertheless, the colonial government arrested Aponte, convicted him of leading the island-wide movement to incite slave insurrections, and hanged him on April 9, 1812. Then it exhibited his decapitated head publicly as a warning against further insurrection.40 In figure 2.1, we see a now-missing plaque dedicated to Aponte and his fellow insurgents.
Figure 2.1. Plaque on Aponte Street in Havana: “To José A. Aponte and Comrades, 1812–April 9–1948, Association of Ex-Combatants and Anti-Fascist Revolutionaries of Cuba.” The bronze plaque disappeared in the 1990s. Photo by Ivor Miller.
Two subsequent movements for the abolition of slavery made Cuban independence an additional goal. They also were named for leading proponents who have come to be known as the intellectual founders of Cuban independence: Félix Varela y Morales, a Roman Catholic priest, and José María Heredia, a poet.41
Born in Havana in 1788, Varela was a professor at the prestigious San Carlos Seminary College, where he created a department of constitutional law that produced several of Cuba’s leading advocates for abolition and independence. When Varela became a representative to the Spanish Cortes (legislature) in 1821, he brought both campaigns—for the abolition of slavery and Cuban independence—to the legislative body. In 1823, the Spanish authorities sentenced Varela to death for his activities and he fled to Philadelphia. There he published an abolitionist paper, El Habanero, which was smuggled regularly into Cuba. Varela remained in exile until his death in 1853. His remains were transferred to Cuba in the early twentieth century.
In the same year that Varela departed from Cuba, an independence group named Los Soles y Rayos de Bolívar (Bolívar’s Offspring) began operations. The group’s leader, José Francisco Lemus, was a Cuban who had fought with Simón Bolívar, and the organization received support from anti-imperial leaders in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Argentina.42 One of its prominent members was José María Heredia. Perhaps best known for his stirring poem “Niagara,” Heredia began to be recognized as a major poet in the 1820s. Cubans today still recall his 1823 poem, “La Estrella de Cuba” (The Star of Cuba), as a work that was integral to their struggle for independence. It opens with the phrase “¡Libertad! ya jamás sobre Cuba” (Liberty! Cuba has never known you), and includes the following stanza:
Today the people dazed, wounded,
Deliver us to the insolent tyrant
Cowardly and stolidly they have not wanted to take up their sword
All lies dissolved, lost
So that my exile shall be a noble tomb
Against terrible, severe fate
Beyond Cuba and my despair.43
Two generations later, the revolutionary leader José Martí spoke of Heredia as his “literary father.” Heredia, he wrote, “woke in my soul, as in the soul of all the Cubans, the undying passion for freedom.”44
Notes
1. Juan Francisco Manzano, The Autobiography of a Slave, trans. Evelyn Picon Garfield (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 57, 59, 61.
2. Rouse, The Tainos, 158.
3. Simons, From Conquistador to Castro, 105.
4. Rouse, The Tainos, 157.
5. Pérez, Cuba, 25.
6. Pérez, Cuba, 25.
7. De la Fuente, Havana and the Atlantic, 3–5; Dick Cluster and Rafael Hernández, The History of Havana (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 5–6; Torres-Cuevas and Vega, Historia de Cuba, 52–53, 72; Julio le Riverend, Economic History of Cuba (Havana: Ensayo Book Institute, 1967), 62; Ilene Ahoha Wright, The Early History of Cuba, 1492–1586 (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 224–26.
8. Arturo Sorhegui D’Mares and Alejandro de la Fuente, “El surgimiento de la sociedad criolla de Cuba (1553–1608),” in Historia de Cuba 1492–1898, third edition, ed. Eduardo Torres-Cuevas and Oscar Loyola Vega (Havana: Editorial Pueblo y Educación, 2006), 108.
9. Klein, Slavery in the Americas, 142.
10. Wright, The Early History of Cuba, 74.
11. Quoted in de la Fuente, Havana and the Atlantic, 4–5.
12. Klein, Slavery in the Americas, 135–36.
13. Gott, Cuba, 26–27.
14. Gott, Cuba, 29.
15. Gott, Cuba, 33.
16. Sorhegui D’Mares and de la Fuente, “El surgimiento de la sociedad criolla de Cuba,” 111; Simons, From Conquistador to Castro, 132; Pérez, Cuba, 27.
17. Simons, From Conquistador to Castro, 108; Gott, Cuba, 37.
18. Pérez, Cuba, 32.
19. Le Riverend, Economic History of Cuba, 134–35.
20. Pérez, Cuba, 47.
21. Pérez, Cuba, 56.
22. Le Riverend, Economic History of Cuba, 135–36.
23. Francisco López Segrera, “Cuba: Dependence, Plantation Economy, and Social Classes, 1762–1902,” in Between Slavery and Free Labor: The Spanish-Speaking Caribbean in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Frank Moya Pons, and Stanley L. Engerman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 84.
24. López Segrera, “Cuba,” 83.
25. López Segrera, “Cuba,” 83.
26. Klein, Slavery in the Americas, 140.
27. Matt D. Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 9.
28. De la Fuente, Havana and the Atlantic, 150.
29. Pérez, To Die in Cuba, 28.
30. Pérez, To Die in Cuba, 31.
31. Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1899 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 10–18; Klein, Slavery in the Americas, 144–46, 162–63.
32. Klein, Slavery in the Americas, 59–61.
33. Klein, Slavery in the Americas, 60.
34. Jane G. Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 140–42.
35. Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 142–43.
36. Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion, 38; Manuel Barcia, Domination and Resistance on Western Cuban Plantations, 1808–1848 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 2008), 31.
37. Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion, 41–42.
38. Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion, 22, 44–45.
39. Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion, 122–26.
40. Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion, 147–54.
41. Sergio Guerra Vilaboy and Oscar Loyol
a Vega, Cuba: A History (New York: Ocean Press, 2010), 17; Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 166, 169.
42. Torres-Cuevas and Vega, Historia de Cuba, 141.
43. José María Heredia, “La Estrella de Cuba,” in Poesias de Don José Maria Heredia, vol. 2 (New York: Roe Lockwood, 1853), 140–41.
44. José Martí, Obras Completas, vol. 5 (La Habana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba, 1963–1973), 165.
Chapter 3
Struggle for Independence, 1868–1898
I am in daily danger of giving my life for my country and duty, for I understand that duty and have the courage to carry it out—the duty of preventing the United States from spreading through the Antilles as Cuba gains its independence, and from overpowering with that additional strength our American lands. . . . I have lived in the monster and I know its entrails; my sling is David’s.
—José Martí1
By 1830, Cuba and Puerto Rico were Spain’s last remaining colonies in the Western Hemisphere. Cuba was the more important possession, because it had become the world’s largest sugar producer. To punish Haiti for winning independence in 1804—which Europe and the United States viewed in effect as a successful slave revolt—importers of Haitian sugar initiated a boycott of the country’s products. In turn, growers shifted production to Cuba, even though it lacked a sufficient number of plantation workers for the increased activity. They solved their labor shortage problem by importing more than 40,000 African slaves from 1802 to 1806. This was almost as many as the number forced into servitude on the island in the previous ten years.2
As generally is the case with migrations, the new immigrants to Cuba tended to lack the kind of nationalist consciousness necessary for an independence war. Moreover, there was a decided class difference between blacks already on the island and the newly arrived Africans. Until the plantation economy took hold in the nineteenth century, African slaves had been employed in all aspects of production and commerce. As noted in the previous chapter, urban slaves were allowed to live in their own homes, to earn wages by “renting” themselves to other owners, and even to purchase their freedom. The broad range in the quality of life for Cuban blacks impaired their ability to form a united opposition to the slave system or to find a common bond for an independence struggle with the newer immigrants who worked on the plantations.
The 1842 census revealed that whites were a minority.3 Moreover they, too, were divided, between the peninsulares and the criollas. Peninsulares were Spanish-born, remained loyal to the Spanish crown, benefited from Spanish colonial control, and viewed the Spanish military as their protectors. Most lived in Cuba’s bureaucratic and commercial centers, essentially acting as agents of Spain, and they tended to dominate Cuba’s political and commercial affairs. As a group, they feared that independence would lead to a black-ruled country that could suffer Haiti’s fate as an international pariah. Indeed, their stance was encouraged by officials in the United States. Secretary of State Henry Clay warned in 1825 that the “amount and character of [Cuba’s] population render it improbable that it could maintain its independence. Such a premature declaration might bring about a renewal of those shocking scenes, of which a neighboring island was the afflicted theatre.”4
Criollas tended to be the rural elites who owned large farms for cattle, sugar, coffee, and tobacco. Born in Cuba with Spanish ancestry, they would ultimately fund and organize the start of the Cuban War for Independence. Their grievances against Spain arose from the failure of the 1865 reform efforts that would have provided the island’s elites with some local autonomy and relief from some Spanish mercantile controls: trade restrictions, high tariffs, and taxes. Lower taxes had been especially demanded because the economy was heading into a depression due to falling sugar prices. When banks suspended payments on obligations in December 1866, this effectively halted all sugar transactions. Then in early 1867, without notice, Spain imposed new taxes. These were particularly harsh for owners of smaller sugar plantations in the eastern half of the island and for cattle barons in Camagüey. In response to the weakening financial conditions, some began to plot rebellion.5 The conspirators included Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, the owner of a modest sugar plantation in the farthest east province of Oriente.
El Grito de Yara
Ten-Year War
On October 10, 1868, Céspedes called together his slaves. To their astonishment, he announced that they were free and asked them to join him in a war for Cuban independence. His declaration, known as the Grito de Yara or Cry of Yara, marked the start of the Ten-Year War. Though Céspedes freed his slaves, the revolutionaries were careful not to include abolition as one of their goals. They hoped to enlist support from western plantation owners for whom slaves made up a significant portion of their wealth. That strategy was successful. Many landowners did support the reformist aims of the rebellion, which called for ending the limitations imposed by Spanish exploitation and mercantilist restrictions.6
Still, the Grito echoed noble sentiments reminiscent of those expressed a century earlier in the US and French revolutions and in the more recent wars for independence in South America: “We only want to be free and to see all men with us equally free, as the Creator intended all mankind to be. . . . We constitute an independent nation because we believe that beneath the Spanish roof we shall never enjoy the complete exercise of our rights.”7
A revolutionary army that began with 147 men grew to 12,000 fighters and by the early 1870s counted as many as 40,000 adherents, reflecting a broad cross-section of the population: men and women, former slaves, free blacks, white workers, and landowners. The revolutionaries called themselves Mambises, named for Juan Ethninius Mamby, a black Spanish military officer who joined the successful independence campaign against Spain that had created the Dominican Republic in 1844.8
The Mambises made equal rights for women a major goal, one of the earliest such efforts in modern world politics. That aspiration became an aspect of Cuban revolutionary identity, especially after the 1959 revolution.9 Ana Betancourt, editor of the revolutionaries’ newspaper, El Mambí, notably called for women’s equality at the 1869 First Constitutional Assembly of Cuban Patriots. She declared, “Citizens: The Cuban woman in the dark and peaceful corner of the home waited patiently and resignedly for this beautiful hour, when a revolution would break her yoke and untie her wings.”10
The Protest of Baraguá
Contemporary Cuban historians focus on four generals as heroes of the Ten-Year War and of Cuba’s struggle for independence, with the message that the July 26th Movement of the mid-twentieth century was the inheritor of their earlier campaigns: Máximo Gómez (who was from the Dominican Republic), Calixto Garcia, Ignacio Agramonte, and Antonio Maceo. Maceo was twenty-two when the war began, and he rose rapidly in a succession of promotions that recognized his bravery, determination, and skill. His prominence was especially remarkable because he was young and from a family of free mulattos.11
The Mambises scored major successes in the early years of the war, employing asymmetrical guerrilla warfare against the Spanish army’s traditional military formations. The rebels defeated superior Spanish forces in several battles, captured some cities, including Bayamo, and established a new government and democratic constitution.
Spain, however, kept the insurgency at bay by using its much larger number of soldiers and unrelenting technical military superiority. After nine years of conflict, rifts developed in the insurgency’s political leadership over the extent to which the war should be waged in the west and over which reforms, especially abolition, they should advance.12 By 1878, the rebels were exhausted and their resources were depleted. An estimated 50,000 soldiers and civilians died in the war.
At that point, Spain sent a new military commander to Cuba, Arsenio Martínez Campos, and offered a compromise to end the conflict. It included some reforms, a guarantee of amnesty, and freedom for any slaves who had fought with the Mambises. In February 1878, rebel
leaders signed a pact that freed some slaves and promised future reforms, but left Cuba as a Spanish colony.
General Maceo, however, broke with other Mambises leaders and refused to accept the pact, because it provided neither independence nor the abolition of slavery. In the “Protest of Baraguá,” Maceo issued a pledge to continue the war, declaring: “Our policy is to free the slaves, because the era of the whip and of Spanish cynicism has come to an end.”13 He retained a fighting force of about 1,000, but the extension of the conflict ended within six weeks, when the Spanish military captured Maceo and forced him into exile. Nevertheless, the “Protest of Baraguá” has become a contemporary rallying cry, representing Cuba’s determination never to surrender.14
“Maceo’s defiance had two important consequences,” historian Patricia Weiss Fagen explains. First, the peace agreement ending the conflict “came to be understood as no more than a truce; second, Maceo’s act strengthened the determination of his countrymen to renew the war as soon as possible.”15 But Maceo did not return to Cuba until March 1895.
A new rebellion flared up briefly in August 1879, known as the Guerra Chiquita or the Little War. Initiated by General Calixto Garcia, it was poorly organized and lacked resources. The fighting ended after thirteen months.16 Maceo remained in exile during the Little War, and Garcia prevented him from gaining any leadership role under the pretext that Spain would use the black general’s presence to claim the rebellion was a race war.
Cuba Suffers an Economic Depression
In addition to the lives lost, the years of war took a toll on Cuba’s economy. Dozens of sugar plantations were destroyed. All twenty-four sugar mills in Bayamo, eighteen mills in Manzanillo, and sixty of the sixty-four mills in Holguín were lost in the years of fighting. The sugar economy also suffered from sugar beet production in France and Germany, which began replacing Cuban cane sugar on the world market.17 The Cuban share of sugar exports globally dropped from 30 to 11 percent from the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s.
Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence Page 4
