The History of Cuba, vol. 2

by Willis Fletcher Johnson

The first revolution in Santo Domingo in 1791 had warned Las Casas and brought home to the administration of Cuba the necessity of looking once more after the defences of the island. He was aided in this task by the chief of the navy yard, D. Juan Araoz, who hastened the work of naval constructions, and in a short time turned out six war vessels, four frigates and a number of boats of lesser tonnage. They proved of great usefulness in the operations against Santo Domingo and Guarico during the second uprising when in order to protect Spanish interests and inhabitants there were sent from Havana the regiment bearing the name of the city and from Cuba a piquet of artillery. That revolt is so closely associated with the problem of slavery, which had become the cause of grave apprehension to the government that it will be referred to in the following chapter. The massacre of French and other colonists in that unfortunate island brought a multitude of refugees to Cuba and materially increased its population.

An event in the last year of the administration of Las Casas gave rise to festivities of a memorable character. When the war between Spain and the French Republic broke out, General D. Gabriel Aristizabal, who operated in Hayti, did not want the ashes of Columbus to be lost during the ensuing disturbances. It seemed more appropriate, too, that they should not remain in the place where he had been slandered and persecuted and where the villain Bobadilla had put him in fetters, but in the island that had always smiled upon him. On the fifteenth of January, 1796, there entered into the port of Havana the warship San Lorenzo, carrying the casket. It was received by Governor Las Casas and General Araoz, the bishops Penalver and Tres Palacios, and between two lines of soldiers was carried to the cathedral, where it was deposited in a humble niche. Though the first city of the island did not then raise a monument to Columbus it was done by a much smaller town, Cardenas, which for this act alone deserves to be mentioned.

The inscription upon the stone, under which the remains of Columbus found rest, reads:

D. O. M. Clares Heros. Ligustin.
Christophorus Columbus
A Se, Rei Nautic. Scient. Insign.
Niv. Orb. Detect.
Araque Castell. Et Legin. Regib. Subject.
Vallice. Occub.
XIII Kal. Jun. A.M. DVI
Cartusianor. Hispal. Cadav. Custod. Tradit.
Transfer. Nam. Ipse Praescrips.
In HISPANIOLAE METROP. Ecc.
Hinc Pace Sancit. Galliae Reipub. Cess
In Hanc V. Mar. Concept. Imm. Cath. Ossa Trans.
Maxim. Om. Frequent. Sepult. Mand.
XIV. Kal. Feb. A. Md. C. C. X. C. V. I.
HAVAN. CIVIT
Tant. Vir. Meritor. In Se Non Immen.
Pretros. Exux. In Optat Diem Tuitur.
Hocce Monum. Erex.
Praesul. Ill. D. D. Philippo Iph Trespalacios
Civic AC Militar. Rei. Gen. Praef. Exme
D.D. LUDOVICO DE LAS CASAS

When the administration of Las Casas came to an end, the municipality of Havana called a testimonial meeting for the sixteenth of December, 1796, which gave proof of the high esteem in which the extraordinary man was held by the people. Four years after his retirement, on the nineteenth of November, 1800, he died of poison. He had not escaped criticism by those who saw in his enforcement of forgotten laws and in many of his new ordinances the manifestation of an arbitrary spirit; but it was universally conceded that during his government Cuba reached a high-water mark in her development. Though the corruption and degradation of the court at Madrid had a baneful influence upon the Spanish colonies, the island which had enjoyed the blessings of his rule and caught a breath of the spirit of such men as Arango and Montalvo could never again be contented unquestioningly to accept the dictates of that court. The flood of new liberal ideas which, coming from France, swept over the whole world, could not be turned back at el Morro. They found their way into the hearts and the minds of the people and slowly but surely taught them to see where their ultimate salvation lay.

CHAPTER XII

The French Revolution set the pace for the world's movements in the last decade of the eighteenth century and spread the seeds of many more in the century to come. Pamphlets, books and proclamations coming to Spain from France opened the eyes of the people to evils, which in their loyalty to the throne and to the traditions of the country they had never dared to perceive. The corruption of her court, the ruin of her finances, the incompetency of her statesmen and her generals were revealed to the population and stirred sullen resentment. Demoralization seemed to have set in and threatened to dismember the once all-powerful kingdom. To the profligate Godoy was in a great measure attributed the degradation of the country and an atmosphere of conspiracy pervaded even the royal palace, from which patriotic plotters, resentful of Spain's humiliation, hoped soon to chase the favorite of the queen, who with supreme unconcern continued to fill his pockets from the royal treasury and to live in his wonted extravagance and dissipation. The forces of the French Republic had occupied the frontier forts and seemed to find little or no resistance. The fate of the royal Bourbons of France struck terror in the souls of the royal Bourbons of Spain, and the flight of the king and his family from Madrid was daily expected.

Even to the overseas possessions of France and Spain had the influence of the liberating movement extended and awakened the indolent and indifferent creoles to the realization of wrongs they had suffered at the hands of their mother countries. Moreover, the gospel of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity had reached the ears of those who had for centuries silently borne oppression and had been made to believe that serfdom was to be their fate forever. Already in 1791 the news of the outbreak of the Revolution had been acclaimed by the slaves in Santo Domingo and followed by revolt and violence against the life and the property of their masters. When in 1794 the Convention declared the abolition of slavery in the colonies of the Republic, the floodgates of insurrection were opened. For Old Hispaniola, divided between two foreign powers, populated by races antagonistic to one another, was a fertile soil for any revolutionary propaganda. As early as 1762 there were three negroes to one Frenchman in the northern part of the island; and these negroes whom a Jesuit priest of the time declared to be fit only for slavery, hated all other races and castes: the whites, the free negroes and the mulattoes.

But even among this ignorant and superstitious race there were individuals that rose far above the average in intelligence and had by association with the more advanced and privileged castes and races acquired certain achievements. They were men who had done some thinking of their own and perhaps by their relation of servant to master learned to know the faults and weaknesses of the latter far better than they knew their own. When these men caught the ring of the magic three words, a world of possibilities opened before them, and they embraced the message they conveyed with the eagerness of people desperate from and resentful of iniquities, real and imaginary. Their brains were afire with hatred and revenge and it needed only a great leader to organize this powerful army of malcontents into a horde of fiends. That leader came to them in the person of the ex-coachman, Toussaint L'Ouverture, a man of exceptional gifts and abilities, who with the one-track mind of the idealist-fanatic had but one aim and pursued but one goal: the liberation of his race.

The war between the French republic and Spain had naturally called forth hostilities between the two parts of the island inhabited on one side by French, on the other by Spaniards. The negro insurgents saw their opportunity and did not let it go by without exploiting it for their purposes. The unfortunate jealousies between the President and Captain-General of Santo Domingo and the General of the Navy, Aristizabel, who had captured Bayaja, had weakened the Spanish forces, and when they attempted to take Guarico, they had to retire at Yazique before a force of five hundred undisciplined negroes. This encouraged the negro commanders and in quick succession they captured San Rafael and Las Caobas, and had the satisfaction to see San Miguel, Bonica and Incha evacuated before they even reached these places. Bayaja was strongly fortified and garrisoned; but the climate of that place being very unhealthy, the Spanish troops were decimated by sickness, until they numbered only about four hundred men. The negro general Juan Francisco on the other hand could increase his troops at will. In order to enforce the Spanish it was proposed to send them a regiment of white Frenchmen. Seven legions of these men arrived at Bayaja on the morning of the seventh of July, 1794. But Juan Francisco surprised the place half an hour before, and placing artillery in the principal streets and squares, informed the commandant that all white Frenchmen were to leave Bayaja before three o'clock that afternoon. When the commandant remonstrated saying that the time was too short to provide barges for their transportation, the negro leader left the government house and gave the signal for the massacre of all Frenchmen in the place. The terrible slaughter lasted until far into the afternoon, when the governor and the venerable priest of the place so urgently implored the negro troops to have mercy, that they moderated their savage rage.