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CHAPTER 1
A White Colony in the Age of "Africanization," 1790s–1830s
The colony Fernandina de Jagua was born of dramatic imperial conflict and social revolutions that shook the entire Atlantic world and thrust open the floodgates of the trans-Atlantic slave trade to Cuba. As the Seven Years' War (1756–1763) raged in Europe, the defeat of Spain in the Battle of Havana (1762) inaugurated the British occupation of Havana (1762–1763). In the eleven short months of British control, at least four thousand African captives entered the port of Havana. Although Spain regained control of Havana by 1763, the British occupation set in motion an irreversible expansion of the plantation complex across the island.
Over the next fifteen years, Spain incrementally liberalized trade in its American colonies. In 1765 Caribbean ports could trade directly with Spanish ones. By 1774 free trade reigned among American ports. Finally, in 1778, as part of the Bourbon Reforms, Spanish monarch Charles III further liberalized trade in Havana, Santiago, and Trinidad; dismantled Cádiz's monopoly on trade; and lowered taxes on key export products, including sugar. Cuban economic elites clamored for greater access to labor — both slaves and white colonists — to fuel economic expansion. It was not until 1789, however, that Spain lifted restrictions on the slave trade. These measures enabled Cuban planters to expand the importation of African captives dramatically. In the decades after the British occupation, an annual average of two thousand enslaved people entered the island, expanding the island's population of African descent to unprecedented proportions. Between 1774 and 1792 the enslaved population in Cuba more than doubled, from nearly 39,000 to 84,000. By that time, a significant demographic shift was already under way in Cuba. In 1774 the white population constituted just over half the total in Cuba (56 percent). However, by 1792 it represented only 49 percent. Whites were no longer a majority in Cuba, leading some Cuban elites to decry the so-called Africanization of the population.
These economic and demographic processes only intensified through the 1790s. In 1791 free people of color, and later enslaved people, laid claim to the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in the French colony of St. Domingue. Enslaved people torched the colony's extensive cane fields, symbols of their enslavement and the lifeblood of the colonial economy. The most immediate impact of the Revolution was that it spurred a massive wave of emigration from St. Domingue, with hundreds of French subjects arriving to Cuba during the 1790s. In 1796, and again in 1798, colonial authorities in Cuba proposed establishing the colony of Fernandina de Jagua with white St. Domingan families.
Yet the idea of white colonization lay dormant for years as sugar and slavery expanded in Cuba. Rather, it was the more systemic shifts caused by the Revolution that ultimately ushered the colony into existence. To be sure, the demise of the world's largest sugar producer during the Haitian Revolution catalyzed a hemispheric economic restructuring, one that transformed Cuba's next century. With St. Domingue's canefields laid waste, Cuban planters quickly expanded production to exploit the soaring world sugar prices. In 1792 only 529 sugar mills existed in Cuba. By 1827 there were 1,000. Cuba quickly replaced St. Domingue as one of the world's largest sugar producers. In 1791 Cuba exported 13,222 metric tons of sugar, having fluctuated between 6,000 and 12,000 since the 1770s. By 1802 Cuban exports had increased to 41,371 metric tons. They reached 51,609 in 1809, with averages between 30,000 and 40,000 for the first decade of the nineteenth century. By the decade of 1830, Cuban exports of sugar regularly exceeded 100,000 metric tons. Moreover, sugar came to occupy a greater share of Cuban economic production, from approximately 35 percent in the 1820s to nearly 70 percent in the 1850s, a proportion that would only grow greater as the century wore on. With sugar crowned king in Cuba, the island became known as the Pearl of the Antilles for the prosperity of its planters and its growing contributions to the Spanish treasury.
The expansion of sugar plantations in Cuba further exacerbated the demand for labor — a need planters met by importing more enslaved Africans. Slave importations increased precipitously, fueling the island's late turn toward plantation slavery precisely as abolitionist currents swept across the Atlantic world. Between 1774 and 1827, the enslaved population in Cuba grew from 38,879 to 286,942 — from 22.8 percent of the population to 40.8 percent. Importantly, the importation of African captives constituted the bulk of this explosion in Cuba's enslaved population.
As the population of enslaved Africans expanded, elite fears of Africanization intensified. The outbreak of several slave uprisings across the island in the 1790s, and later the Aponte Rebellion, a slave uprising inspired by the Haitian Revolution that erupted in western Cuba in 1812, seemed to exacerbate these racial anxieties. The colonial government responded with swift repression, sending a clear message to Cuban planters that Spanish military presence on the island was essential for maintaining the racial order amid increasing slave importations. Thus, at precisely the moment that Creoles across mainland Spanish America freed themselves from colonial rule, Cuban planters drew closer to the Spanish Crown as a strategy to preserve slavery.
Having watched in horror as the institution of slavery collapsed in the colony formerly known as St. Domingue, and witnessing the precursors to similar events in Cuba over the next two decades, colonial administrators in Cuba took swift action to quash slave resistance. They banned the importation of Creole slaves from French and English ports to prevent the contagion of unrest. Colonial administrators also implemented a Reglamento de Cimarrones (Runaway Slave Code) in 1795, prescribing preventative and punitive measures for slave resistance. That same year, captain-general of Cuba Luis de Las Casas convened a committee of prominent planters, property owners, and merchants like Francisco Arango y Parreño and Antonio Morejón to study how to contain the slave uprising. The committee, called the Real Sociedad Patriótica, offered two ideas to address Cuba's imagined demographic woes. They briefly entertained the idea of limiting the slave trade to Cuba, and replacing enslaved Africans with Indians imported from the mainland colonies. They also proposed expanding the island's white population through selective immigration policies. Thus, ongoing fears of Africanization gave birth to one of the most significant experiments in urban development in the Atlantic world: white colonization.
Both abolitionism and white colonization came to the fore in 1817. That year Spain entered into the first anti-slaving treaty with Great Britain, which would prohibit the importation of enslaved Africans beginning in 1820. The demographic implications of restricting slave imports were limited at best, however. In fact, slave importations into Cuba actually spiked after the first Anglo-Spanish Treaty. Although most elite white Cubans could agree with the premise of preserving Cuba's mythic white identity, Cuba's sugar planters had become dependent on the labor of enslaved Africans. Moreover, like most slave societies based on sugar plantation economies, Cuba's enslaved population suffered from extraordinarily high mortality rates and low fertility rates due to grueling work rhythms, physical violence, malnutrition, and disease. Thus, planters relied on a constant stream of slave imports to replenish the island's enslaved population. Rather than restrict the slave trade, planters actually sought to sustain and expand it despite mounting legal restrictions. At the same time, colonial administrators enabled the clandestine trade by imposing increasingly rigid slave codes and augmenting the military presence to ward off potential slave rebellion.
The same year as the anti-slaving treaty of 1817, Spanish monarch Fernando VII issued a royal decree that took a different approach to mitigating the so-called Africanization of Cuba. The king expressly declared his desire to "promote the augmentation of the white population on the island," that is, white colonization. Under these auspices, Cuba's Captain-General José Cienfuegos and his finance minister, Alejandro Ramírez, established the Junta de Colonización Blanca — the White Population Board. This committee was responsible for bringing to fruition the forgotten task of increasing the island's white population. The metropolitan government offered concessions, including land grants and the temporary suspension of taxes, to further incentivize white settlement. In addition, the junta would collect a head tax on each male slave imported into the island to pay for the transportation of white families from Europe or the Americas to Cuba and to provide rations for a short time.
Fernandina de Jagua was one of the first and most important of several white colonies founded in the early nineteenth century. Jagua consisted of a fledgling town surrounded by rural neighborhoods. The town itself began with just twenty-five blocks — a perfect five-by-five-block square. At the center of these projected urban spaces was one block reserved for the main plaza, opposite of which would sit the municipal buildings and church (Figure 1.1). Each remaining urban block was divided evenly into ten rectangular solares, or parcels, which would be distributed free of charge to honorable white settlers over the first two years after the establishment of the colony. Keeping with the tradition of most Spanish American cities, residents of highest social standing generally resided closest to the main plaza. The most prominent settlers not only maintained their households in town but also owned agricultural and ranching lands in the rural neighborhoods.
If Cuba's late love affair with slavery created the demographic conditions that brought Fernandina de Jagua into existence, the simultaneous restriction of the Slave Trade defined the colony's early settlement. The economics of white colonization relied on the persistence of the legal slave trade to Cuba. Funding white colonization with a tax on slave importations might have been profitable in the short term, but it ultimately proved unsustainable. The Junta de Colonización Blanca had fatally overlooked legislation from earlier in 1817 stipulating the end of the (legal) slave trade by 1820. The chronic lack of resources plagued white colonization projects through the 1820s.
As anti-slaving measures removed the main source of funding for white colonization, a robust clandestine slave trade fueled the expansion of the island's black population. In fact, during the first twenty-five years of white colonization, the so-called Africanization of Cuba reached its peak. Between 1817 and 1827 Cuba's population of African descent increased from 313,000 to 393,000, a faster rate of growth than for the white population. By 1841 enslaved people numbered 436,495, totaling roughly 43 percent of the island's population. Alongside a growing enslaved population, the island's free population of color also grew, reaching 153,838 in 1841 — around 15 percent of the population. Cuba's ever-expanding population of enslaved Africans metamorphosed the island from the colonial backwater populated mainly by whites into a sugar plantation economy powered by slave labor.
Jagua was not immune to these dynamics. I argue that despite the colony's official racial exclusivity, lived realities of settlement and subsistence during the first two decades of its existence evinced more complex social and racial relations. White settlers arrived at Jagua as slave owners, sometimes bringing with them significant numbers of enslaved people of African descent. These bondsmen and women played a central role in the colony's early economic and social life, as well as their transitions out of slavery. Free people of color also took up residence in the colony, migrating from as far off as the southern United States and Curaçao, and as close as the very lands that became part of the city. Many of the colony's earliest free black inhabitants had achieved a modicum of upward social mobility as workers and tradesmen, which allowed them to migrate from other central Cuban cities.
These men and women of African descent are the subject of this chapter. In particular, I explore the ways white and black residents responded to the discrepancy between the colony's founding mission and its lived realities. The failure of total racial exclusion gave way to alternative attempts at urban order, governed in large part by restricting black settlers' access to prime land. From the very beginning of the colony, it was evident that black property ownership was generally located outside the most coveted centric areas inhabited by whites. The result was an urban geography with a distinctive white center surrounded on all three inhabitable sides by black and multiracial enclaves, usually in low-lying or otherwise marginal or undesirable zones. The de facto racial segregation defining Cienfuegos during its early-nineteenth-century development defies the conventional wisdom that Latin American approaches to race were defined by the absence of such clearly defined geographic separation between races.
The Challenges of White Colonization
In 1817 Luis D'Clouet presented the White Population Board with his plan to establish a colony at the Bay of Jagua on Cuba's south-central coast. Captain General José Cienfuegos and Intendant Alejandro Ramírez approved the petition, granting one hundred caballerías (approximately 3,320 acres) of good-quality land near the Bay of Fernandina de Jagua. D'Clouet and forty-six other Frenchmen from Bordeaux and New Orleans founded a rudimentary settlement at the mouth of the Saladito River. Shortly thereafter, Agustín Santa Cruz and his wife, Antonia María Guerrero y Castillas, who owned significant swathes of land in Caunao, donated 130 caballerías of their land on the Majagua to be distributed by founder D'Clouet, in a failed attempted to secure the rank of military colonel and the title of Conde de Santa Cruz de Cumanayagua. By 1819 D'Clouet relocated his followers to that location, where he established the settlement. He christened it the colony of Fernandina de Jagua in honor of Spanish king Fernando VII, and after the indigenous name for the adjacent peninsula, Xagua or Majagua.
Once Jagua was established, the labor of white colonization began in earnest. D'Clouet was charged with distributing the land donated by Santa Cruz to forty "honorable families." Any "white person of either sex over the age of eighteen with the ability to work," who migrated to the colony from outside Cuba within its first two years, was eligible to receive a land grant of one caballería (about thirty-three acres). The terms of the grant required settlers to clear, plant, build, and occupy the land within the first six months after concession. Lured by the promise of land and six months of government-issued rations, white families flocked to the fledgling bayside colony. Between April 1819 and February 1822, one thousand settlers migrated to the colony. Of these, 459 met the eligibility requirements for receiving a land grant, and 122 were underage foreigners hailing from various ports in the United States (New Orleans, Baltimore, Philadelphia), and France (Bordeaux). The remaining 419 had migrated to Jagua from other parts of Cuba. By late 1822 Jagua boasted ninety key landowning families, listed as vecinos (townspeople), all of whom were white. This principal landowning population was divided along national lines, with approximately half of French or French colonial origin, with most of the remaining settlers of Spanish or Spanish American origin.
Broader hemispheric developments intensified the significance of divisions along national lines, with white settlers of French, North American, and Spanish birth. In 1808 French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte forced Spanish king Fernando VII to abdicate the throne. The ensuing crisis of the Spanish monarchy set in motion the first sparks of a broader anticolonial struggle in the Spanish American mainland. In only its fourth year of existence, Jagua was swept into these movements, when a Mexican residing in the neighboring town of Caunao attempted to incite a rebellion against Spain. In 1823 he and several dozen Caunao residents, known as Yuquinos, launched an ill-fated attack on Jagua's French residents. Settlers' resistance against the attack consolidated Jagua's reputation as a loyalist stronghold, a legacy that would endure through the very last days of Spanish colonial rule.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Cuban City, Segregated"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Bonnie A. Lucero.
Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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