The History of Cuba, vol. 1

by Willis Fletcher Johnson

It is my purpose in these volumes to write a History of Cuba. The title may imply either the land and its natural conditions, or the people and the nation which inhabit it. It in fact implies both, and to both I shall address myself, though it will appropriately be with the latter rather than with the former that the narrative will be most concerned. For it is with Cuba as with other countries: In the last supreme analysis the people make the history of the land. Apart from the people, it is true, the Island of Cuba is of unusual interest. There are few countries of similar extent comparable with it in native variety, charm and wealth. There are few which contribute more, actually and potentially, to the world's supplies of greatly used products. One of the most universally used and prized vegetable products became first known to mankind from Cuba, and there to this day is most profusely and most perfectly grown and prepared; while another, one of the most universally used and essential articles of food, is there produced in its greatest abundance. There also may be found an immense number and bewildering variety of the most serviceable articles in both the vegetable and mineral kingdoms, in noteworthy profusion and perfection, together with possibilities and facilities for a comparable development of the animal kingdom.

Nor is the geographical situation of the island less favorable or less inviting than its natural resources. Lying just within the Torrid Zone, it has a climate which combines the fecund influences of the tropics with the agreeable moderation of the Temperate Zones. It fronts at once upon the most frequented ocean of the globe and upon two of the greatest and most important semi-inland seas. It lies directly between the two great continents of the Western Hemisphere, with such supremely fortunate orientation that travel and commerce between them naturally skirt and touch its shores rather than follow the longer and more difficult route by land which is the sole alternative. A line drawn from the heart of the United States to the heart of South America passes through the heart of Cuba. A line drawn from the mouth of the Mississippi to the mouth of the Amazon traverses Cuba almost from end to end. Circled about the island and fronting on the narrow seas which divide them from it are the territories of no fewer than fourteen independent national sovereignties. It lies, moreover, directly in the path of the world's commerce between the two great oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific, by the way of that gigantic artificial waterway which, created largely because of Cuba, was the fulfilment of the world's four centuries of effort and desire. There is scarcely a more suggestive and romantic theme in the world's history than this: That Columbus made his epochal adventure for the prime purpose of finding a passageway from the Atlantic to the Pacific; or rather from Europe to Asia by way of the Atlantic, since he assumed the Atlantic and the Pacific to be one; that, failing to find that non-existent passageway, he found Cuba instead and imagined that he had found therein the fulfilment of his dreams; that four centuries later that passageway was artificially provided through the enterprise and energy of a power which in his day had not yet come into existence; and that this transcendent deed was accomplished largely because of Cuba and because of the conflict through which that island violently divorced herself from the imperial sovereignty which Columbus had planted upon her shores.

Lying thus in a peculiar sense at the commercial centre of the world, between North America and South America, between Europe and Asia, between all the lands of the Atlantic and all the lands of the Pacific and subject to important approach from all directions, we must reckon it not mere chance but the provision of benevolent design that Cuba at almost all parts of her peculiarly ample coastline is endowed with a greater number of first-rate harbors than any other country of the world. In recognition of these facts and of their gradual development and application to the purposes and processes of civilization, is a theme worthy to pique the interest and to absorb the attention of the most ambitious historian, whether for the mere chronicling of conditions and events, or for the philosophical analysis of causes and results.

All these things, however, fascinating as they are and copious as is their suggestion of interest, are after all only a minor and the less important part of the real History of Cuba, such as I must endeavor to write. Without the Cuban people, Cuba would have remained a negligible factor in the equations of humanity. Without the people of the island, "what to me were sun or clime?" The genial climate, the fecund soil, the wealth of mines and field and forest, the capacious harbors and the encircling seas, all would be vanity of vanities. Nor is it for nothing that I have suggested differentiation between the Cuban People and the Cuban Nation. Without the development of the former into the latter, all these things could never have hoped to reach their greatest value and utility. The Cuban People have existed for four centuries, the Cuban Nation in its consummate sense for less than a single generation. Yet in the latter brief span more progress has been made toward realization of Cuba's possibilities and destinies than in all those former ages. It is a circumstance of peculiar significance that almost the oldest of all civilized communities in the Western Hemisphere should be the youngest of all the nations. It will be a task of no mean magnitude, but of unsurpassed profit and pleasure, to trace the deliberate development of that early colony into this late nation, and to observe the causes and forces which so long repressed and thwarted the sovereign aspirations of the Cuban People, and also, more gratefully, the causes and forces which inevitably, in the slow fullness of time, achieved their ultimate fulfilment in the secure establishment of the Cuban Nation.

The origin of the Cuban People presents a striking historical and ethnological anomaly. The early settlers of the island, and therefore the progenitors of the present Cuban people, were beyond question the flower of the Spanish race at the very time when that race was at the height of its marvellous puissance and efficience. The Sixteenth Century was the Golden Age of Spain, and they were conspicuous representatives of those who made it so who implanted the genius of their time upon the hospitable soil of the great West Indian island. That rule has been, indeed, common to the colonial enterprises of all lands. The best men become the pioneers. Colonization implies adventure, and adventure implies courage, enterprise, endurance, vision, prudence, the very essential elements of both individual and civic greatness. Strong men, not weaklings, are the founders of new settlements. Even in those lands which were largely populated involuntarily, as penal settlements, the same rule holds good; because many of the convict exiles were merely political proscripts, who in fact were men of virtue, light and leading, often superior to those who banished them.

There is fruit for almost endless thought and speculation in the circumstance that so many of the early Cuban settlers, as indeed of all the Spanish explorers and conquerors of the Sixteenth Century, came from the two Iberian Provinces of Estremadura and Seville. They were, and are, two of the most widely contrasting provinces of Spain. The one a rude, rugged, half sterile region of swineherds and mountaineers, poverty-stricken and remote; the other plethoric with the wealth of agriculture, industry and commerce, and endowed above most regions of the world with the treasures of learning and art. Yet it was from barren, impoverished and uncultured Estremadura that there came Cortez, Pizarro, Balboa, De Soto, and their compeers and followers. We might speculate upon the questions whether great men were thus numerously produced by nature in that region by way of compensation for the paucity and poverty of other products; and whether it was because of their innate genius or because of their desire to seek a better land than their own, that they became the adventurers that they were. The other province which most contributed to the founding of Cuba had from time immemorial been noted for its wealth and culture. In the days of the Cæsars it had been the favorite colonial resort of the plutocracy and aristocracy of Rome, and it had been the birthplace of the Emperors Hadrian, Trajan and Theodosius. Under the Catholic Kings it was the capital and the metropolis of Spain and the chief mart of her world-wide commerce. Indeed it would not be difficult to establish the proposition that it was with the removal of the capital from Seville to Madrid, and the change of national and international policy which was inseparably associated with that removal, that the decline of Spain began.

Cuba was thus in her foundation the fortunate recipient of the rugged and masterful spirit of Estremadura, and of the elements of government and of social grace and intellectual power which Seville could so well and so abundantly supply; and these two contrasting yet by no means incompatible elements became characteristic of the Cuban people; complementarily contributing to the development of a national character quite distinct from that of the Mother Country or that of any other of her offshoots. For the Cuban people and their social organism, separated far from Spain, though subject to her rule, retained largely unimpaired their pristine vigor, and avoided sharing in the degeneracy and decline which befell the Peninsula soon after the malign Hapsburg influence became dominant in its affairs of state; a decline which in the Seventeenth Century became one of the most distressing and pathetic tragedies in the drama of the world.

It was an interesting and a significant circumstance, too, that while Spain was resplendent and exultant in the Golden Age of the Sixteenth Century, Cuba remained intellectually dormant and inactive, and that when at the end of the Eighteenth Century Spain reached her nadir of degradation, Cuba began to rise to intellectual puissance. While Spain was great, it was to be said of Cuba stat nominis umbra; but when Spain declined, Cuba arose to take her place, insistent that the race and its letters, at least, should not universally fall into decay.

It is one of the anomalies of Cuban history that while the island was denied the enjoyment of even those incipient and inchoate intimations of potential nationality which were granted to other Spanish provinces, such as Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia and Peru, it was nevertheless, perhaps more than any other, involved from early times in the international complications and conflicts of Spain. At least equally with the mainland coasts Cuba's shores were ravaged by pirates and freebooters, and were attacked or menaced by the commissioned fleets of hostile powers. Her insular character and her geographical position doubtless accounted for this in great degree, as did also the purblind policy of Spain in failing to give her the care and protection which were lavished upon other no more worthy possessions.

So it came to pass that for a time Cuba was actually conquered and seized by an alien power and was forcibly separated from Spanish sovereignty; and that for many years thereafter she was the object of covetous desire and indeed of almost incessant intrigue for acquisition by two of Spain's chief rivals and adversaries. For nearly half a century Great Britain and France were frequently, almost continuously, each planning to annex Cuba as a colonial possession, either by conquest in war or through barter or purchase in time of peace. It was not until a third great power arose and asserted in unmistakable terms its paramount interest in the island, only a little while previous to our own time, that such designs were reluctantly forsaken.