The History of Cuba, vol. 3

by Willis Fletcher Johnson

ANTONIO BACHILLER

Patriot, economist and man of letters, Antonio Bachiller y Morales was born in Havana on June 7, 1812, and was educated for the bar. He wrote several volumes of poems and plays, but gave his best attention to valuable treatises on Cuban history, industry, agriculture, economics, administration, and law. He was one of the foremost authorities and writers on Cuban and Antillean archaeology. He was professor of philosophy in the University of Havana, held various public offices, and was a patriotic orator of great power. He died on January 10, 1889.

These men saw with exultation the enkindling of a spirit of liberty in the Iberian Peninsula. They saw the revolt of Spain against Joseph Bonaparte. They saw the Spanish people dictate to their Bourbon king that Constitution of 1812 which had it been triumphantly enforced would have marked an epoch in the history of the rights of man. They sympathized with and exulted in these things, and hoped for their extension in Cuba. It was only when they sadly realized that these things, even if gained for Spain, were not for Cuba, and that Liberal Spain was as illiberal toward Cuba as ever despotic Spain had been, that they turned from autonomy to independence. Then the intellectual activities which had been directed to the achievements of the Peninsula, were turned to the interests of the island.

The bearer of one of the greatest names in the literature of Cuba and of Spain, José María Heredia, was born at Santiago de Cuba on December 31, 1803, and died at Toluca, Mexico, on May 7, 1839. Because of his early identification with the cause of Cuban freedom in the "Soles y Rayos de Bolivar" he was compelled to flee to the United States, whence he presently went to Mexico and there spent the remainder of his life, holding places of high rank and importance. He was at once advocate, soldier, traveller, linguist, diplomat, journalist, magistrate, historian, poet. His "Ode to Niagara" has made him illustrious in American literature. His general writings have given him conspicuous rank among the world's great lyric poets of the Nineteenth Century.

The most striking exemplar of the pro-Spanish attitude of which we have been speaking, as well as perhaps the greatest of all Cuban poets, was José Maria Heredia; of whom the world too often thinks as a Spanish rather than as a Cuban genius. He was born in Cuba in 1803, the son of parents who had fled from Santo Domingo to escape the fury of the revolution of Toussaint l'Ouverture. His father had formerly been a Chief Justice of the Venezuelan court at Caracas, under the Spanish government, and was loyal to Spain, though he detested and protested against her tyrannies and corruption and imbued his son with a passionate love of liberty. The younger Heredia established himself in the city of Matanzas, as a successful lawyer. But already he had written many poems, chiefly of freedom. They were in praise of Spain, and of the Spanish aspirations for liberty which were manifested in the Constitution of 1812. Indeed, never did Heredia commit himself against Spain, harshly as he was treated by her. But the poems which he had written in glorification of the Peninsular struggles for liberty against Napoleon and against the Bourbons were recognized by his countrymen to be equally applicable to the Cuban struggle against Spain, which was already impending, and they were consequently taken up throughout the island in that sense and for that purpose. This circumstance, though unintended by him, subjected him to grave suspicion; and he was presently charged with complicity in an insurrectionary movement in 1823, and was banished from Cuba for life. After a brief visit to the United States he went to Mexico, became a government official, married, and spent the rest of his life there, with the exception of a few weeks in 1836, when the Spanish authorities permitted him to revisit Cuba, though their espionage made his visit anything but pleasant. He died in 1839.

Heredia, who has been called the Byron of Spanish literature, and who is claimed by Spain as one of the glories of her letters, is known in Cuba largely by his patriotic poems, and his poems on nature. In the United States, where because of his exile from Cuba his poems were first printed, he is chiefly known by three great compositions, two of which were translated into English by William Cullen Bryant. These are his "Ode to Niagara," Which ranks among the greatest poems ever written by any poet on that theme; his "Ode to the Hurricane"; and a sonnet addressed to his wife. It is with his political and patriotic poems, however, that we are now most concerned, and of them it may be said that seldom have the aspirations of a people for freedom been expressed with more passionate eloquence. His first important poem, "The Star of Cuba," written while he was yet in his teens, expressed a readiness to die, if need be, for Cuba, leaving his head upon the scaffold as a token of the brutality of Spain. Years afterward, in exile, he apostrophized Cuba as the "land of light and beauty," and then thus prophesied:

My Cuba! Thou shalt one day rise

From 'neath the despot's hand,

Free as the air beneath thy skies

Or waves which kiss thy strand.

In vain the traitor's noxious plots,

The tyrant's wrath is vain;

Since roll the surges of the sea

Between thy shores and Spain!