Cuba

Article Outline

Introduction; Land and Resources; People; Culture; Economy; Government; History

Colonization

On his first visit, Columbus optimistically assessed the island’s natural beauty and the abundance of wildlife, noting the variation of coastal harbors, high mountains, tropical rain forests, and rolling savannas. On his second voyage in 1494, Columbus charted Cuba’s southern coast, mistakenly declaring the territory a peninsula of Asia’s mainland. In 1508 Sebastian de Ocampo mapped the entire coastline and determined that Cuba was an island.

Cuba attracted little interest from Spanish settlers until the Spanish colony on Hispaniola became overcrowded and indigenous laborers grew scarce. In 1511 Diego Velázquez, a Spanish colonist from Hispaniola, landed ships carrying 300 soldiers on Cuba’s southeastern shore near Guantánamo. He encountered native resistance led by Hatuey, a chief who had escaped from Hispaniola and who knew the ways of the European conquerors. It took three months to defeat and execute Hatuey.

Also in 1511 Spanish soldier Pánfilo de Narváez sailed from Jamaica along the southern coast of Cuba. He forced Native Americans to convert to Catholicism and to accept the Spanish monarch as their leader. In 1515 Velázquez and Narváez were joined by an overland army, which marched east across Cuba as far as what is today Havana. The Spaniards massacred both warriors and civilians as a means of breaking their will to resist. These conquerors founded many of Cuba’s oldest towns. Many of these settlements, such as Baracoa, Trinidad, Puerto Príncipe, Havana, and Santiago de Cuba, were located on harbors, but two, Sancti Spíritus and Bayamo, were interior towns.

The Spanish monarchs rewarded the conquerors and their soldiers with encomiendas, jurisdiction over geographical areas. This jurisdiction included the right to tax Native Americans and force them to work for the benefit of the encomendero who had the right to the tribute and labor of the Native Americans. The Spanish put native Cubans to work in mines, on agricultural estates, as household servants, and as soldiers in armies bound for the American mainland. Wrenched from their ecological and social communities and subjugated to overwork, malnutrition, and new diseases, the Arawaks and Ciboney were nearly exterminated by 1542. Yet during the first half of the 16th century, native Cuban rebellions occurred against the Spanish populations in Puerto Príncipe, Bayamo, and Baracoa. Rather than become Spanish slaves or starve, many of Cuba’s original inhabitants killed their own children and committed suicide. Conquest, mistreatment, overwork, malnutrition, disease, and suicide reduced the native population to 3,000 by 1555.

Prosperity and Plunder

Cuba’s strategic location in the Caribbean made it an important port and military base. The Spanish organized a shipping system that transported European goods to the Americas and returned American wealth and resources to Spain. Cuba was an important part of this system. It guarded the sea channels through which the treasure ships passed twice a year. Havana harbor served as a base for refitting the treasure fleets before the return voyage to Spain.

This concentration of Spanish treasure drew the attention of other European powers. The French attacked Havana in 1555, only two years after it had been named the new capital of Cuba. King Charles I of Spain immediately established a naval base. He built several imposing fortresses to guard the mouth of Havana’s harbor and stationed between 400 and 1,000 soldiers to defend Cuba’s coasts. Suddenly Cuba began attracting settlers who served as military personnel, built ships, provided food, and constructed buildings. However, little of the riches that passed through Havana Harbor reached the Cuban population, who remained poor, with very little economic security.

The Spanish military presence was focused around Havana in the west, leaving eastern Cuba open to French and English raids. Eastern Cuba also emerged as a center of illegal trade in Cuban tobacco, cattle, and sugar. Many Spanish colonists regularly broke the law to trade with foreign merchants because they disliked the official Spanish policy. This policy decreed that only Spanish merchants could trade with the colony, keeping import prices high and reducing profits on Cuban exports.

In the 17th century Cuba began importing Africans to work as slaves (see Atlantic Slave Trade). The slaves replaced the rapidly disappearing indigenous people as laborers in copper mines and on sugar plantations. By 1650 African slaves numbered 5,000, compared to an indigenous population of 2,000. Under Cuban law slaves could buy their freedom, and eventually the Cuban population contained a high number of free blacks and mulattoes.

The arrival of slaves resulted in one of the most notable characteristics of Cuba’s heritage: a racially mixed population. During the first two centuries of Spanish settlement, few European women settled in Cuba. Spanish men married or had relationships with indigenous and African women. Cuba’s classes and races blended, producing a mixture of religions, music, language, foods, and customs that combined three cultures into a new Cuban culture.

In the early 18th century, Spain introduced a series of administrative reforms in its colonies designed to modernize colonial institutions. The first reform focused on the tobacco trade, creating a tobacco monopoly in Cuba that set prices, regulated production, and sold products abroad. The monopoly kept most of the profits for itself, and its policies provoked three armed rebellions among Cuban tobacco growers between 1717 and 1723. The last uprising resulted in a compromise, which allowed Cuban growers to sell two-thirds of their crops outside the monopoly.

Another attempt at reform centered on sugar production. The royal company established in 1740 made high profits from the sugar trade. However, its wealth created inflation within Cuba, driving small farmers and people not involved in sugar to near ruin. Sugar output expanded, and by 1760 those with influence in the sugar monopoly became Cuba’s new elite.

During the 18th century, Cuba began developing its own cultural and social institutions. Cubans built seminaries—schools for training priests—and founded other schools, including the University of Havana, established in 1728. Access to higher learning and the arts was not restricted to the elite class. Slaves who had purchased their freedom began forming associations that paid for education and medical treatment for their members. Some blacks were able to advance into the middle class as well, but the owners of large sugar plantations continued to dominate the economy, and most wealth went to Spaniards and white Creoles (people of Spanish ancestry born in Cuba).

Some of the Spanish policies that had hampered Creole hopes for economic advancement ended abruptly as a result of the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), which pitted France and Spain against the British. In 1762 Havana was attacked and held by the British. Though the British occupation lasted only ten months, it opened Cuba’s economy to free trade with Britain and her colonies. When the British pulled out of Cuba at the end of the war, Spain relaxed its trade policy and permitted Spanish colonies to trade among themselves. This increased Havana’s importance to both Spain and the other Spanish colonies.

Sugar and Slaves

The sugar industry received a major boost when a slave rebellion broke out in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) in 1791. The slaves massacred many of their French masters and drove the remaining French planters from the colony. Prior to the revolt, Saint-Domingue had a booming coffee and sugar industry that depended on African slaves. After 1791 Haiti’s sugar production never matched its former output, and Cuba emerged as the world’s major sugar producer.

Enterprising Cuban landowners bought new land, built additional sugar refineries, and imported unprecedented numbers of African slaves. Between 1780 and 1788, more than 18,000 slaves were brought to Cuba. That number increased to over 125,000 between 1789 and 1810. Between 1811 and 1820, the decade of the greatest African slave trade, over 161,000 human beings were carried against their wills from Africa to Cuba. For the next 40 years, over 200,000 new slaves labored on plantations. Creole plantation owners flourished, slave traders bought land and built plantations with the profits they made from selling slaves, and Spanish moneylenders filled their pockets with the interest from loan payments for land purchases. Cuba’s economy became a monoculture, an economy based on one product. The economy boomed in years when world sugar prices were good and went bust when prices were down.

Sugar production rested on slave labor, and the life of a slave in Cuba was often harsh. Most Cuban slaves were males who worked long, hard hours clearing land and cutting cane on the sugar plantations. Once a slave began work in a sugar field, his or her future life expectancy shrank to eight years. Plantation owners tended to work slaves hard until they died and then replaced them with new slaves. The sugar harvest required backbreaking work. From November to May, slaves worked shifts of 16 to 19 hours daily. During the slow months from June through October, owners could not work their slaves more than 9 hours a day by law. Women could be field slaves, and when they were, they worked the same hours and at the same jobs as men.

Generally slaves were well fed. They lived in shelters that were usually kept neat by older women, who also looked after the children. Sundays and holidays were reserved for planting gardens for the slaves’ subsistence, and the Africans could hold their own religious ceremonies during this time. Santería, a mixture of beliefs from Catholicism and the African Lucumí religion emerged. By the end of the 19th century blacks and whites alike practiced this religion.

Treatment of slaves varied according to the whims of masters, even though laws offered theoretical protection. Overseers carried whips, which they used to move people along or to punish them. Not all slaves accepted their conditions. Some runaway slaves made it into interior mountains, where they lived in organized communities called palenques (runaway communities) that the police and the Spanish army tried to destroy.

Just as sugar drove the economy and the importation of slaves, it also shaped the makeup of the Cuban population, changing the proportion of whites to blacks and mulattoes, and of free people to slaves. Liberal policies allowed slaves to obtain their freedom. These policies distinguished Cuba from many other nations with slavery; they also meant that Cuba’s population contained a significant number of free people of color. According to the official census of 1774, the Cuban population was 56.4 percent white, 19.9 percent free blacks or mulattoes, and 23.7 percent black slaves. This sizeable population of free blacks worked as artisans, independent farmers, stevedores, small entrepreneurs, and professionals. At first the Spanish believed that free blacks made positive contributions to colonial society, but they soon became concerned that black intellectuals would support emancipation and slave revolts.

Independence

Growth of the Independence Movement

By 1826 most Spanish colonies in Latin America had achieved independence from Spain (see Latin American Independence). These independence movements were led by Creole elites seeking to gain control over their political and economic destinies. In Cuba, however, high-ranking Creoles had been frightened by the Haitian Slave Revolt and did not support a revolution against Spanish rule.

Throughout the 19th century, slavery was fundamental to sugar production in Cuba, where the largest amount of sugar in the world was grown and refined. At a time when national plantation economies were gradually emancipating slaves, Cuba was importing them from Africa and breeding them in Cuba. To preserve slavery, some Cubans advocated annexing Cuba to the United States, where the institution was still legal in the southern states. In 1848 at the request of annexationists and U.S. planters, U.S. president James K. Polk offered Spain $100 million for Cuba, an offer that Spain turned down. In 1854 the United States again proposed to buy Cuba, this time for $130 million, but this offer was also rejected. The annexationists made up a faction of the independence fighters by 1868.

Cuba’s ties with the United States had been growing throughout the 19th century. The United States provided a large market for Cuban sugar and supplied food, machinery, household goods, financing, and technology to the island. Cuba conducted far more trade with the United States than with Spain, which helped convince many Cubans that they had little need for Spanish colonial control.

However, not all members of Cuba’s elite classes supported annexation. A number of intellectuals objected to joining the United States because of the cultural and historical differences between Cubans and Americans. Some reformers, called autonomists, wanted Cuba to be able to control its internal affairs while remaining a part of the Spanish Empire. Others, the separationists, sought complete independence from Spain and the United States.

The Ten Years’ War

On October 10, 1868, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, a Creole planter from eastern Cuba, launched a revolt that would become known as the Ten Years’ War. The rebels initially were not seeking independence, but merely social reforms, including effective representation, freedom of association and speech, tax reform, racial equality, and Cuban participation in the island’s administration. After realizing that Spain was unwilling to make concessions, the rebels became committed to full independence from Spain.

The Cuban patriots had few weapons, no army, and no government. They fought an improvised guerrilla war against well-provisioned, highly trained Spanish troops. The patriots fought mainly with machetes, the long knives used to harvest sugarcane. Most of their actions involved hit-and-run attacks in which they raided the estates of pro-Spanish planters and set fire to sugar fields in an attempt to eliminate revenue that would support the Spanish army. The rebels linked Cuban national identity with social reform. They pledged to make Cuba a country in which black and white citizens would have the same legal rights. Consequently, blacks and mulattoes of all classes made up a huge proportion of the independence army.

De Céspedes and fellow insurrectionists called a Constituent Assembly at Guaímaro in 1869 to solidify rebel objectives and form a revolutionary government. The insurgent leaders soon encountered difficulties in uniting the Cubans. Most rebels came from eastern Cuba. The majority of people in western Cuba continued to support Spain, mainly because wealthy planters in the west opposed freedom for slaves.

The Spanish responded to the rebels by bringing in tens of thousands of soldiers. They destroyed plantations whose owners were suspected of supporting independence and built a series of north-south trenches across the island to protect the west from the insurgents in the east. By 1878 the patriots were exhausted and had lost the will to continue the struggle. The Spanish proposed a treaty that granted a general amnesty and a pardon for all rebels. While most rebels agreed to the treaty, General Antonio Maceo, a free black and a strong supporter of emancipation, rejected it. He fled to the United States and joined other Cuban exiles in New York. They planned a second revolt, and in the summer of 1879 General Calixto García Iñiguez led rebel troops in the Guerra Chiquita (The Little War), which lasted about nine months before it collapsed.

Despite the rebels’ losses to the Spanish, the uprisings did much to create a strong sense of nationalism among Cubans. At first the rebels preferred reforms rather than an outright break with Spain. By the end of the Ten Years’ War, they were committed to full independence. As whites and blacks fought together during the conflict, many of the old racial and social divisions that characterized Cuba’s colonial social structure began to dissolve. Many supporters of independence saw the future struggle for independence as inseparable from the struggle for racial and class equality in Cuba.

Windows Live® Search Results

Colonization

Prosperity and Plunder

Sugar and Slaves

Independence

Growth of the Independence Movement

The Ten Years’ War