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La Belle Créole
The Cuban Countess Who Captivated Havana, Madrid, and Paris
By Alina García-Lapuerta Chicago Review Press Incorporated
Copyright © 2014 Alina García-Lapuerta
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61374-539-7
CHAPTER 1
HAVANA
A CITY OF SEA AND LIGHT
A traveler arriving in the city of San Cristobal de La Habana in the winter of 1789 would have easily found the city's cathedral. The huge building sat in one of Havana's main plazas — La Plaza de la Catedral — its surprisingly plain, asymmetrical towers and contrastingly ornate facade made in part of pale grey coral rock from the nearby sea. The sea could also be sensed in the undulating baroque curves of the cathedral's facade, reminiscent of breaking waves, interrupted by three great wooden doors. Along the cathedral square, the magnificent family palaces of the Pedroso, the Penalver, and the Marqués de Aguas Claras stood with their arcades offering shady paths against the sun. The plaza was a central meeting point in Havana, and all day long the different people of the city would pass by — merchants, artisans, soldiers, slave traders, aristocrats and slaves — going about their daily business as the great bells of the cathedral marked the passing of the day. The cathedral's beauty and grace would have stood out even in the days of ornate buildings. A later Cuban writer would call it "music set in stone."
On that winter day of February 16, 1789, the cathedral's thick walls obscured the light and sounds of the tropical street life while Havana's vicar general, Don Luis Peñalver y Cárdenas, solemnly baptized a ten-day-old infant girl, María de las Mercedes Josepha Teresa Bárbara Luisa de Jesús Santa Cruz y Montalvo. Mercedes took her place as the latest link in the chain of an intricately related creole aristocracy. The aristocracy was creole in the Spanish sense of the word, meaning born in the empire's colonies but tracing its lineage back to Spain. Blessed with young and wealthy parents, a beautiful mother, and powerful relatives, Mercedes seemingly had a sparkling, preordained destiny. The baby's maternal and paternal lines, both firmly entrenched in Cuba's economy and administration, would play a critical role in the transformation of the island from a lesser Spanish possession into the sugar powerhouse of the nineteenth century.
But Cuba in 1789 was not quite what most people would have imagined; even the cathedral had only replaced the decrepit old main parish church in 1779. Indeed, the building only received the rank of cathedral in 1788 when Havana was promoted to a diocese, rather late for a capital city founded in the early sixteenth century. Cuba had been one of Columbus's earliest discoveries, and he had praised it extravagantly as "of such marvelous beauty that it surpasses all others ... as the day doth the night in lustre," having claimed it under the name Juana for Spain and los Reyes Católicos, Fernando and Isabel. But this beautiful island with its rich mahogany-filled forests, valleys covered in royal palms, and white beaches, had quickly been eclipsed by the later conquests of the Aztec and Inca empires. Cuba had only made its mark as a critical staging post for the most amazing and rich treasure fleets ever to sail the transatlantic routes. The gold and silver of Peru, Mexico, and Colombia all sailed to Spain on the fleets that stopped in Havana's deep-water port. To protect the port and the treasure route, the Spaniards built forts or castillos all around Havana, and it remained a walled city into the nineteenth century.
Havana is a city of sea and light. The city sits on the northern coast of the island of Cuba, the largest island of the Caribbean, which spreads out like a lizard in the sun. Cuba's position in the Caribbean controls the entrance to the Antilles, and both the Spanish conquistadores and their colonial challengers quickly realized it was the key to controlling the new world: la Llave del Nuevo Mundo, as the royal decree of 1634 named it. The original old city, founded in 1519, faced the harbor, a protected bay with a pincerlike narrow outlet to the sea that facilitated military defense. Walled on its inland boundaries for protection, with two sea-facing fortresses at its entrance and three more along both sides of its bay, it was a fortress city. The oldest fortresses, La Punta, La Fuerza, and El Morro, were made of coral rock or limestone known locally as piedras conchíferas. Small bits of sea creatures can still be seen in their massive bases, and the stone cannot be cleanly carved or polished. The sea seems to exist in their very walls, which take on a luminescence in soft early morning and late evening light.
The need for these monumental city defenses had been quite real — pirates had burned the first settlements to the ground and killed many of the early inhabitants in 1538 and again in 1555. Within living memory, the British forces of Lord Albemarle had laid siege to it, captured it, and held it for a year in 1762. During that year, the great monastery church of San Francisco de Asís was used for Protestant worship, the bishop of Cuba was deported, and slaves and goods poured in in huge numbers as the British opened Cuba to free trade. Spanish trading restrictions resumed with Spanish rule in 1763, but Havana's yearlong British sojourn helped begin the transformation of Cuba from a small sugar producer, in the shade of the fabled Sugar Islands of Barbados, Jamaica, and St. Domingue, into the Queen of Sugar by the 1820s.
The families attending Mercedes' christening in the new cathedral represented some of the main landowners of Cuba who together owned most of the estimated five hundred sugar mills, including the nine mills on Mercedes' grandfather's huge estate. Their family names appear over and over in the list of civic officials and officers of the local militias: Beltrán de Santa Cruz, Cárdenas, Montalvo, O'Farrill, Herrera, Chacón, Calvo de la Puerta, Peñalver, Nuñez del Castillo, and Castellón. They had married with the descendants of older settlers, including the original founders of Havana and first city officials: Sotolongo, Recio, Pérez Barroto, Guilizasti. The original conquistadores and settlers, arriving in Havana with the Governor Diego de Velázquez de Cuéllar, built their first homes in the humblest of materials, emulating the native Arawaks by using mud and the branches and bark of royal palms to make little thatched huts or bohíos.
In those early days, the sound of thousands of crabs coming up from the sea in search of food was a nightly occurrence, and the settlers' landholdings were dedicated to raising cattle and pigs for food and hides. The streets were not paved, and when night fell only moonlight broke the otherwise absolute darkness. The future Plaza de la Catedral was merely a swampy area regularly flooded by the bay. The many fruit trees planted by the early settlers led to infestations of mosquitoes, described by one visitor in 1598 as ferocious. The adult Mercedes immortalized these vicious insects after her celebrated 1840 visit, recalling how she bathed her arms in aguardiente distilled from sugarcane to repulse the insects. With her arms soaked in the cane spirits, she would sit writing her letters while being fanned by a young slave girl.
Despite these challenges, those early settlers seemed beguiled by the richness of the land. Havana's terrain was incredibly fertile, with much of the land covered in forests with huge ceiba trees spreading their enormous canopies, and rich cedars and mahogany along with granadillos and jaguas. Throughout the area, indeed throughout the whole island, the majestic royal palms rose straight and tall above all other trees. The Cuban forests would provide one of the first important exports for the newly arrived Spaniards. Cuban-sourced mahogany and other tropical hardwoods would initially be used to repair ships carrying gold and silver from Mexico and Peru, then as material for Philip II's Escorial palace and monastery back in Spain, and finally to build the great ships of the Spanish navy or armada in the eighteenth century.
The pirate raids of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century eventually led to the building of the city walls, although that project took over one hundred years to complete. The original single-street settlement clinging to the water's edge had expanded considerably by 1789, and the buildings were no longer made from various bits of royal palms. From the late sixteenth through the early eighteenth century, handsome houses began to appear along with churches and plazas. However, many streets remained narrow and crowded, following the instructions laid down by the Laws of the Indies, which demanded narrow streets in the tropics to offer shelter from the relentless sun. The unappealing smell of tasajo — the dried meat supplied in huge quantities to visiting ships of the Flota de Indias — filled these claustrophobic streets. Even in 1800, the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt would describe walking through congested streets knee-deep in mud.
Busy streets were not surprising given Havana's role as the meeting point of Spanish fleets and home to a major shipyard. Mercedes' great-grandfather, Lorenzo Montalvo, had directed the building work for the royal shipyard, the Real Arsenal. The Real Arsenal was the largest shipyard in the world at the time, and produced great ships such as the towering 136-gun Santísima Trinidad (1769). So important were the shipyards that in 1763, after the departure of the British, Carlos III of Spain created a naval office in Havana and named Lorenzo Montalvo as its intendente general. The Havana shipyards employed all sorts of craftsmen and laborers who resided year-round in the city. The sailing of the Spanish fleets, however, brought a major influx of visitors that swelled the local population. Spanish treasure ships would sail from the mainland ports of Veracruz (Mexico), Cartagena de Indias (Colombia), and Portobelo (Panama). Veracruz also received the cargo carried overland from Acapulco, the destination of the Pacific-based Manila galleons. The cargoes would include more than just gold and silver; they would also include spices, porcelain, and silk from the Philippines and China. Ships would meet in Havana to form great convoys to Sevilla and later to Cádiz, the main Spanish ports for the Indies. The Flota de Indias continued sailing until 1776, but even after its official end, ships continued to round El Morro and enter Havana's harbor in growing numbers.
As a port city, Havana had numerous taverns, boarding houses, gaming dens, and brothels. Most of its disreputable venues were concentrated in the poorer southern area of the city. The sailors who poured into Havana for weeks at a time made great use of its amenities — even in those early days, the city had a reputation for licentiousness that lives on through the present day. Havana also had a reputation for contraband. The Spanish crown had maintained a strict monopoly on all trading activity to its New World possessions through its port of Cádiz, but the aftermath of the British takeover saw the liberalization of trade with other Spanish ports in 1765. Both before and after 1762, the local need for slaves and their ready availability in nearby British Jamaica made the contraband trade an open secret, adding to Havana's dubious reputation.
Slavery, unfortunately, played an important role in the city's economic life. The first slaves had arrived in the New World in 1505, sent by Fernando of Aragón to the island of La Española (the Dominican Republic and Haiti). Slavery was quite common in Spain at the time, having also flourished under the Moors, so it was not strange for the Spanish crown to send slaves to its new possessions. As with commercial trade, Spain restricted the slave trade through the use of licenses, which awarded monopoly rights to specific companies. The British won the concession from 1713 to 1739 through the Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the War of the Spanish Succession. The license was granted to the London-based South Sea Company with Havana as the entry port for all Cuban slave traffic. After 1790, Cuba's first proper newspaper, El Papel Periódico de la Havana, carried advertisements for individual slaves. These ads lie scattered amid more mundane ones for used volantes (carriages), clavichords, and recently arrived European books: stark evidence of the eighteenth century's perspective of slaves as a mere commodity. This trade in humans initially brought Mercedes' great-great-grandfather, Richard O'Farrill y O'Daly, from the British island of Montserrat to Havana as the first representative of the South Sea Company. O'Farrill settled in Cuba, becoming a Spanish subject and marrying a well-connected widow, María Josefa de Arriola. He remained active in the slave trade but also invested in sugar plantations after the concession changed hands.
As a fortress city, Havana also housed countless soldiers. Not only were there fixed regiments from the Spanish army stationed in Havana, there were also locally raised creole militias with regiments of whites and free blacks. Cuba after the British-controlled year of 1762 was a thoroughly militarized society. Even the most prominent citizens were fully integrated into military operations, with almost all the families having various members who were militia commanders or officers in the Spanish army. Many held membership in prestigious military orders such as those of Santiago, Calatrava, or Montesa. Whatever their landholding and commercial interests, the creole elite served the king's armies and his civil services because in the Spanish Empire, all authority and power centered on the king and royal court; all power and all decrees emerged from Madrid. The Spanish government co-opted the leading citizens through quasi-honorary appointments as senior militia officers.
Mercedes' family abounded in military connections, with relatives holding military appointments in the royal forces and militias. Her father, Joaquín de Santa Cruz y Cárdenas, a captain of the white militia of Havana at the time of her birth, would eventually rise to the rank of mariscal de campo (field marshal). Mercedes was also the granddaughter of the Count de Casa-Montalvo, Ignacio Montalvo y Ambulodi, a brigadier in the royal army and a colonel of a Cuban regiment of dragoons. Mercedes' female relatives often married military men, in some cases Spanish officers, such as her great-aunt María Manuela de Cárdenas, wife to the then general and later mariscal de campo Pedro de Mendinueta. At her baptism, Mercedes' extended family could count some nineteen officers of the royal army including twelve present or future generals and mariscales de campo.
The men in Mercedes' family circle also held many of Havana's civic offices. Some of these positions were officially hereditary while others passed along informally within a particular family. In many cases, the Spanish crown sold offices outright. With their dominance in commerce, military, and civic posts, the various families attending the baptism in the Havana cathedral formed a creole oligarchy well placed to lobby for Cuban interests and to benefit from the tremendous economic growth about to transform Cuba. From 1762 to 1792, sugar cultivation grew by 1,500 percent and exports increased tremendously. Spain faced growing pressure to open more ports to Caribbean products and to eliminate the slave trade monopoly. Cuba's population also increased by approximately one hundred thousand from 1774 to 1792, although it was still a relatively racially balanced society compared to the neighboring British and French islands. Sixty-nine percent of Cuba's population in 1792 was free, including a large black and mixed-race component.
While Havana's seamier side might be notorious, the elegant plazas and palaces housing its wealthier citizens appeared a world away. Moving away from the humble bohíos of early days, the Habaneros (Havana residents) built masonry homes based on Moorish-influenced Spanish style. The new homes were designed with greater permanence in mind but also sought to protect their occupants from the intense Cuban sun — the sun that influenced so much of daily life. The chronicler from 1598 recalled "the burning rays of an oven-hot sun," and Mercedes later claimed that "throughout the day, one languishes under the heavy weight of the sun." Early creole homes were constructed around a square or rectangular central patio. All rooms would open onto this patio in a manner designed to catch every possible breeze and ensure optimal ventilation. The Cuban desire to benefit from the island breezes became a national characteristic; even now a soft breeze is something to treasure and enjoy. Mercedes captured this longing, recalling the feeling of "voluptuous delicacy" that accompanied the arrival of longed-for breezes.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from La Belle Créole by Alina García-Lapuerta. Copyright © 2014 Alina García-Lapuerta. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
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