The History of Cuba, vol. 2

by Willis Fletcher Johnson

In science that era was adorned with the names of Priestly, Jenner, Herschel, Montgolfier, Fulton, Whitney, Volta, Pestalozzi, Piazzi, Davy, Cuvier, Oersted, Stevenson, Humboldt, Lavoisier, Buffon, Linnaeus. In music, Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. In literature the annals of those days read like a recapitulation of universal genius: Goethe, Kant, Herder, Lessing, Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau, De Stael, Chateaubriand, Beranger, Lamartine, Burns, Scott, Goldsmith, Johnson, Adam Smith, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Colderidge, Lamb, Alfieri, Richter, Niebuhr, Derzhavin. The steamboat and the railroad came into existence. The Institute of France, the University of France, and the University of Berlin were founded. As on more than one other occasion political and military activity, in the direction of liberal revolution, stimulated intellectuality and made invention and letters vie with arms.

Amid all this, Spain alone stood singular in her decline. Not one name of the first rank adorned her annals. In the two departments of letters which perhaps most of all reflect the national mind and spirit, lyrical poetry and the drama, she was almost entirely lacking. Most of such writers as she had seemed content to copy weakly French examples. And even when the Spanish people rose with splendid patriotic energy against the tyranny of Napoleon, fought their war of independence, and strove to establish their liberal Constitution of 1812 upon the wreck of broken Bourbonism, there was scarcely a glimmer of intellectual inspiration such as those deeds might have been expected to produce. It was reserved for later years, even for our own time, for Spanish letters to regain a place of mastery amid the foremost of the world.

Meantime the intellectual life of Cuba was beginning to dawn. As early as 1790 a purely literary journal of fine rank, El Papel Periodico, was founded in Havana, and during many years contained contributions of sterling merit. As these were all unsigned, their authorship remains chiefly unknown. We know, however, that among them were two poets of real note, Manuel Justo de Rubalcava and Manuel de Zequiera y Arango. These were not, it is true, native Cubans. They were Spaniards from New Granada. But with many others from the South and Central American provinces they became fully identified with Cuban life and Cuban aspirations. In the third year of the nineteenth century, too, there was born of Spanish refugee parents from Santo Domingo, Cuba's greatest poet and indeed the greatest poet in Spanish literature in that century, José Maria Heredia. True, he called himself a Spaniard, in the spirit of the "Ever Faithful Isle," and referred to Spain as his "Alma Mater." He was in his youth a passionate partisan of the liberal movement in the Peninsula, especially of the revolution led by Riego, and his earliest poems were written in support of that ill-fated struggle and in scathing denunciation of the French oppressor of Spain and of those unworthy Spaniards who consented to the suppression in blood of the rising cause of liberty. A little later these very poems were equally applicable to the situation in Cuba, when the people of that island began to rise against their Spanish oppressors, and when a certain element among them consented to oppression. Thereafter his writings were largely the literary inspiration of Cuban patriotism; and he himself was doomed by Spain to perpetual banishment from the island of his birth.

One other factor in the situation must be recalled. During the period which we are now considering Cuba was the asylum for a strangely mingled company of both loyalists and revolutionists; with the former probably predominating. When Spain lost Santo Domingo to France, many of the Spanish inhabitants of that island removed to Cuba; and when the island under Toussaint rose against Spain, there was a flight of both Spanish and French in the same direction. Also, when one after another of the Spanish provinces on the continent began to revolt, Cuba was sought as an asylum. Spanish loyalists came hither to escape the revolution which they did not approve; and it is quite possible that they were in sufficient numbers materially to affect the course and determination of the island, first in standing by Ferdinand against Napoleon and later in declining to join the revolutionists of the American continents. Yet not a few of these became in a short time imbued with Cuban patriotism and cast in their lot with the natives of the island.

There were also many revolutionary refugees, who sought asylum in Cuba when their cause seemed not to be prospering in other lands. As we shall see, the first important Cuban revolutionist, Narciso Lopez, came from Venezuela; and there were others from that country, and from Guatemala and Mexico; sufficient to exert much influence in insular affairs.

It was in these strangely diverse and complex circumstances that Cuba entered the third great era of her existence. She was still a Spanish colony, and she was still a potential pawn in the international games of diplomacy and war. But she had at last gravitated politically toward the American rather than the European system, and she had begun to develop a spirit of individual nationality which was destined after many years and many labors to assure her a place among the sovereign states of the Western Hemisphere.

CHAPTER XVII

For a correct understanding of the internal dissensions and uprisings which played so large a part in the history of Cuba during the greater part of the nineteenth century, it is necessary to have clearly in mind an idea of the number, nature and distribution of her population during this period.

The first record of anything like a satisfactory enumeration of the people of the island is that of the census of 1775. It was known as that of the Abbe Raynal, and was taken under the direction and by order of the Marquis de la Torre. It was so far from being accurate and complete that it can hardly be regarded as much more than a fair estimate. Indeed, most authorities are of the opinion that its figures are far below the actual facts. It showed a population of 170,370, for the entire island, with 75,604 of this number residing in the district of Havana.

The population of Cuba at that time was made up almost entirely of two races, the whites and the blacks, the native Indians having long ago practically disappeared. The following table gives a brief resumé of the result of the census of 1775: