Cuba: A History - Sergio Guerra-Vilaboy

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cattle ranchers filled many a long chapter in Cuba’s early history.

      Spain’s trade monopoly, established through the Casa de Contratación de Sevilla, the king’s organization for handling trade with Latin America, weighed particularly heavily on Cuba as Spain failed to supply its colony with the bare necessities. With the creation of the Spanish fleet in 1566, ships began to congregate in the port of Havana, making it the most important port in the New World. The galleons were not supposed to remain there for more than a few weeks, but delays often meant they stayed for months at a time, which stimulated the production and sale of many goods in the settlement of San Cristóbal de La Habana.

      The number of inns and taverns also grew apace, promoting the rise of prostitution, especially among black slave women, who were authorized by their owners to “earn” wages. To protect the wealth held in Havana, the mother country built La Punta Fortress and Real Fuerza and Tres Reyes del Morro castles at the entrance to Havana Bay, making the city the best-fortified one in the Americas. The important families whose members served on the town council and who were linked to businesses profiting from the visits of the Spanish fleet began to amass considerable capital, resulting in an economic boom in the 18th century.

      Abandoned to their fate, the settlements outside Havana received no benefits from the visiting fleets and quickly turned to smuggling, using hidden coves and rivers as rendezvous points with English, French and Dutch pirates and corsairs, trading local goods for articles not sent by Spain. Both the settlers and the Spanish regional authorities engaged in this contraband trade. The Crown made great—but fruitless—efforts to halt these activities. Melchor Suárez de Poago, the representative of Governor Pedro Valdés, failed to stop the extensive smuggling operations of the people of Bayamo early in the 17th century. This led to legal action that was suspended while being tried in the Crown Court of Santo Domingo.

      Corsairs of Spain’s enemy nations often attacked Cuba. They included Francis Drake, Francisco Nau, Henry Morgan and Gilberto Girón, who captured Bishop Juan de las Cabezas Altamirano in Bayamo in 1604. The bishop was rescued by a slave in an episode immortalized in Espejo de Paciencia (Mirror of Patience), the first poem about Cuba written on the island. To avoid such attacks, Spain tried to impose new administrative controls and approved the transfer of the capital to Havana in 1553.

      The island was also divided into two administrative regions: Santiago de Cuba and San Cristóbal de La Habana, with the former subordinated to the latter. Trinidad, Sancti Spíritus and San Juan de los Remedios, the settlements in the middle of the island, were not included in either of these regions, so their inhabitants enjoyed some autonomy for decades. Spain exercised control through such laws as the Cáceres laws, promulgated by Judge Alonso de Cáceres in 1574, which regulated many aspects of Cuba’s economic and social life.

      The Spanish fleets promoted urban development in Havana, such as the construction of the Main Parish Church between 1550 and 1574 and the Monasteries of Santo Domingo and San Francisco in 1578 and 1584, respectively, and the plan for the Royal Canal in 1592 to provide the settlement with water. There was little progress elsewhere, and only two more important settlements were founded some time later in Santa Clara and Matanzas.

      Because of its interest in developing modern agriculture in Cuba, the Spanish monarchy established a state monopoly on tobacco. The Royal Treasury bought the entire year’s crop, paying whatever price it chose. Any tobacco it did not buy had to be destroyed. The tobacco growers protested vigorously, but their claims were ignored. Tensions mounted steadily from 1717, culminating in 1723, when the tobacco growers tried to burn down the tobacco warehouses in Havana, an action repressed savagely by Governor Gregorio Guazo who hanged 14 tobacco growers. This was just one of the many clashes that took place between the Spaniards in Spain and those living in the colonies.

      By the middle of the 18th century, the monopoly system reached a new stage when the Royal Trading Company of Havana was created with capital contributed by businessmen living in Cuba and in Spain and by the Crown. The company imported and exported all kinds of commodities, including slaves. Shareholders, speculating in production and trade, made considerable profits. This benefited Havana but none of the other settlements. Havana’s urban and cultural development continued with the establishment of a Royal Examining Board of Physicians, to supervise the work of dentists, doctors and pharmacists; the arrival of a printing press in 1723; and especially, the founding of the long-desired University of Havana in 1728. With close to 50,000 inhabitants (half of the entire population of Cuba), by 1762 Havana was the principal Spanish city in the Caribbean and Central America.

      This was highlighted that same year, when the Family Pact between France and Spain brought Spain into France’s war with Britain. Britain decided to seize Havana and landed an expedition of more than 10,000 men a few miles east of the city; after a fierce struggle, they occupied the elevation on which Morro Castle stood, on the eastern side of the entrance to Havana Bay, forcing the city’s authorities to surrender.

      This placed the western part of Cuba under British rule for close to 11 months. Rather than changing the existing structures, the British made it easier to bring in slaves and this gave an enormous boost to the slave trade, especially with the 13 British colonies in North America, an initial contact that had unexpected consequences in Cuba’s later history.

      Eventually, Spain recovered its beautiful city by swapping Havana for Florida. The most important aspect of all this was that, while the Spanish authorities did very little to prevent the loss of Havana, its inhabitants and those of neighboring towns—whites, free blacks and slaves—led by José Antonio Gómez (Pepe Antonio), the mayor of Guanabacoa, fought courageously to defend Havana, exhibiting a strong sense of national pride.

      After recovering Havana, Spain further strengthened the city by building the huge La Cabaña Fortress next to Morro Castle, thereby indicating Cuba’s importance in the forthcoming new era.

      Slave plantations were the prevailing system of production in Cuba for nearly a century, from the end of the 18th century up to 1886. This system did not originate in Cuba but was already in use on the other islands of the Antilles and especially in the United States and Brazil. This socioeconomic system produced tropical raw materials for the world market, using slave labor that was generally imported from Africa.

      Several closely related factors were responsible for the extension of the plantation system in Cuba’s specific conditions: the accumulation of capital in the hands of the Havana oligarchy; the “enlightened despotism” of the Spanish monarchy, which adopted more effective methods of rule; the 1804 Haitian revolution, which destroyed the coffee and sugar production of that colony; the fact that Francisco de Arango y Parreño and other key figures who established close relations with the Spanish government were members of the town council of Havana; the law regulating free trade between Spain and the Indies, promulgated in 1778, which liberalized the trade monopoly to some extent; the rapid increase in the numbers of slaves brought to Cuba, a vital stimulus to the economic boom; and the large amount of land still available.

      The plantation system spread throughout the eastern and southern parts of what is now Havana province, which had not yet been urbanized, and throughout the areas that are now Havana and Matanzas provinces, as well as Sagua la Grande, Cienfuegos, Trinidad, Santiago de Cuba and Guantánamo. As the plantations spread from west to east, the Havana-Matanzas region was dotted with sugar mills; more sugarcane production meant more blacks, both slaves and freed men and women, more Spaniards, better railroads, and greater scientific advances and cultural development. The traditional cattle ranches were largely replaced by the plantation system, which left its mark on all sectors of Cuban culture and society.

      Inevitably, the ideology and culture emanating from the plantation system reflected the need to justify and maintain slavery. In Cuba’s case, from the theoretical point of view, this promoted reformism. It was a time when most of the Spaniards living in Cuba began to think of themselves as Cubans, and the seeds of the nationalist

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