Menendez was governor of Cuba for a little more than six years, from
October 24, 1567, to December 13, 1573. Those were important years for
the world at large. They saw the Duke of Alva, as governor of the
Netherlands, establish there the Bloody Tribunal, and in return the
"Beggars of the Sea" engage in their indomitable campaigns against the
oppressor, extending even to the coasts of Cuba. Spain engaged in a
great war with the Ottoman Turks. France had the second and third civil
wars, culminating in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day. Elizabeth of
England fully committed herself to the Protestant cause and was
excommunicated by the Pope. Mary of Scotland fled from her throne and
was succeeded by young James VI.
Menendez, more a statesman of world-wide vision than any of his
predecessors, was not unmindful of these transactions, or of the far
greater events which they portended, and he strove after his fashion to
prepare Cuba for her part in great affairs. He realized that in the wars
of the European powers their American possessions were increasingly
likely to become implicated. Despite his utmost efforts, various other
nations sent vessels to West Indian waters, to harry the fleets of
Spain. The numbers of such intruders were increasing. His utmost efforts
had not been sufficient to drive the French away and to keep them away.
Now others than the French began to appear. The "Sea Beggars" of the
Netherlands were daring navigators and formidable fighters, and they
began to prowl around the coasts of Cuba. English captains had found
their way to the Spanish Main, and Hawkins made his way to Vera Cruz,
and Drake plundered Nombre de Dios.
Finding himself unable to protect the Spanish treasure ships and to keep
all enemies away from West Indian waters, Menendez sought at least to
make Cuba secure against invasion, or its capital--for such Havana was
about to become in name as well as in fact--secure against capture and
looting by buccaneers. To this work he gave his chief attention, and,
above all else, to the completion of La Fuerza. The rebuilding of that
fortification dragged scandalously. Sometimes it was for lack of money,
sometimes for lack of workmen. Menendez told the Council for the Indies
that in its unfinished state it was an actual menace to the town,
because a hostile force could easily land and capture it, and having
done this, they could quickly complete it and make it almost impregnable
against any attempt to drive them out. He did not explain why he could
not complete it as quickly as an invading force could, but he asked for
a force of three hundred negro slaves to work on it. With them, he said,
it would be possible to finish the fort in two years. The Council was
not favorably impressed. It could not understand how a few score
buccaneers, landing and seizing the fort, could finish it in a few days,
while it would take Menendez with three hundred slaves two years to do
the work.
Diego de Ribera, as Acting Governor, also took up the matter. The fort
was already sufficiently advanced to permit him to mount eight pieces of
artillery, but he wanted twenty more. Also, he wanted a large permanent
garrison of professional soldiers. It was unsatisfactory to have to
depend upon a rallying of the citizens, because it interfered with the
occupations of the citizens, because they were not expert in arms, and
because when they were summoned not more than half their number
responded, so that the commander never knew how many he could depend
upon. There should, he urged, be a permanent garrison of two hundred
men, under the command of the governor. Of course such a garrison could
not be furnished by the town itself, because there were not in all
Havana more than two hundred fighting men, all told. This gives, by the
way, a hint concerning the rapid growth of the place at the time of
Mazariegos. A town containing two hundred men capable of bearing arms
must have had a total population approximating two thousand.
Ribera's arguments and appeals appear to have been more effective than
those of Menendez. The Council for the Indies, and the King, too,
ordered practical steps to be taken for finishing and equipping the
building which had so long been neglected. As Cuba, or perhaps
especially the port of Havana, was of no great importance to the Spanish
colonies on the mainland, for the safeguarding of their shipping, and
also as Cuba had been so drained of men and supplies in former years for
the exploitation of colonies on the main land, it was but justice as it
was a matter of practical convenience and expediency for the government
to call upon Mexico and Castilla del Oro to contribute largely to the
payment of the cost of fortifying Havana. That place was a little later
called, by royal decree, "Llave del Nuevo Mundo y Antemural de las
Indias Occidentales," or Key of the New World and Bulwark of the West
Indies. Certainly it was fitting that the New World should pay for its
key and that the Indies should pay for their bulwark.
So Mexico was required to contribute four thousand ducats, and Florida
to provide fifty good men to form the garrison of La Fuerza. The cost of
maintaining the garrison was charged against Venezuela and Darien. The
providing of labor was a more difficult matter. It seemed to be settled
that negro slave labor must be employed. In order to secure it at little
cost it was proposed to give slave-traders the privilege of taking as
many slaves as they pleased to Cuba, provided that they would lend them
to the government to work on La Fuerza until its completion; after which
they might be sold or otherwise disposed of at the traders' will. The
objection to this from the traders' point of view was the length of time
that it was expected to take to finish the fort. The government
estimated it at three years. Now the traders would have been willing
thus to lend their slaves for a shorter time, for six months, or for a
year. But they considered three years entirely too long. After working
for so long a time, under a rigorous taskmaster, the average slave would
be so nearly worn out that his value would be much impaired. So that
scheme failed.
The next plan for getting labor for the fort was disastrous. A contract
was made with a trader to provide three hundred negro slaves, by the end
of 1572. He did deliver 191 of them in the summer of that year, and
later sent the rest but they never got further than Hispaniola. The 191
whom he did deliver were, however, infected with small pox. A number of
them died of that plague after their arrival at Havana, and the
contagion got abroad in the city with the result that many other slaves
and a number of the Spaniards also perished from it. Still, enough of
the slaves in that plague-stricken cargo survived to cause the
authorities of Havana much embarrassment in feeding and clothing them.
Agriculture was not yet receiving the attention which it deserved, and
even a hundred or a hundred and fifty more mouths to feed overtaxed the
local resources. Requisition was therefore made upon the government of
Yucatan to send a sufficient supply of corn and meat to feed the slaves,
while the king himself undertook to clothe them. He was led to do this
in a way which strikingly indicates the limitations of Philip's mind. To
all appeals for clothing for their comfort or for decent appearance's
sake, he was deaf. But when it represented to him that they must have
clothes in order to be able to attend mass, he at once ordered them to
be clad from his royal bounty!
More money was needed, and was raised in various ways. An examiner went
about the island, looking into the accounts of public officials.
Generally he found that there was something due to the state from them.
Of the money thus collected, nearly all, to the amount of nearly four
thousand pesos, was devoted to the costs of the fort. Other funds were
taken for the purpose, and when there was still a deficit it was
actually proposed to sell some of the slaves to pay for the maintenance
of the rest. This counsel of despair was not, however, acted upon.
Instead, Sancho Pardo Osorio when acting governor, near the end of
Menendez's administration, advanced much money from his own purse,
trusting to the government to reimburse him. Another draft of four
thousand ducats was finally obtained from Mexico, and smaller sums came
from Venezuela and Darien. Thus the enterprise dragged on, until the
summer of 1573 found the fort still far from finished, the builders of
it heavily in debt for labor, materials and maintenance, and the
garrison, workmen, and citizens of Havana all profoundly dissatisfied.
Naturally, and inevitably, this state of affairs reflected upon
Menendez, and compassed his downfall. He was not merely governor of
Cuba. He was Adelantado of Florida, and he gave to Florida his first
thought and chief attention. He spent most of his time there, leaving
Cuban affairs to be administered by acting governors of his own
selection. This was altogether unsatisfactory to the people of Cuba, and
especially of Havana. They wanted their governor to live among them,
where he would be accessible, and pay much more attention to them and
their interests. So they began agitating against him, and demanded a
governor who should not be Adelantado of Florida, nor subject to that
functionary. They did more than complain. They refused supplies. They
would not send to Florida the supplies which Menendez urgently needed
for his enterprises there. When the King reprimanded them and bade them
do their duty, they replied with surprising defiance that they wanted
payment, first, for supplies long ago furnished to the Havana garrison.
They also wanted to be relieved of the burden of being compelled to
guard or to watch the coast themselves, at their own cost for arms and
ammunition. They wanted these things done for them before they would
trouble themselves for the furtherance of the Adelantado's enterprises
in Florida.
Meantime, the Council for the Indies, at Seville, was also unfriendly to
Menendez. Tired of the delay in building La Fuerza, it recommended to
the king his removal in favor of someone who would more vigorously
expedite that essential work. It was the bitter irony of fate that he
should thus be condemned for failing to do the very thing upon which he
had most set his heart to do. The Council also condemned him for faults
of administration which were due, it held, to his personal neglect
through absence from the island, and it therefore urged that a governor
be appointed in his place who would spend his time chiefly in Cuba and
would give to that island and its interests his first and best thoughts.
These representations were made to the King as early as the spring of
1571, and they had much weight with him.
The sequel was that in 1572 Menendez was recalled to Spain, and was
commissioned for a work similar to that in which he had first won
distinction, to wit, the protection of Spanish commerce against hostile
privateers; only it was not now the commerce between Spain and Mexico
which he was to safeguard in the West Indian seas, but that between
Spain and the Netherlands, along the coast of France and in the British
Channel. In that capacity he was commander of a considerable fleet, and
the work was doubtless in itself congenial to him, and one which he was
well fitted to perform with success. But his heart was set on Florida,
with which he aspired to be identified as Cortez had been with Mexico
and Pizarro with Peru; and he bitterly lamented his being so far
separated from that country.
So far as his governorship of Cuba was concerned, which is all in which
we need here be interested, he had at this time reached the beginning of
the end. The king decided to remove him from that office, though
probably not so much to get rid of him there as to be able to keep his
valuable talents continually employed nearer home. He had decided that
Menendez was of more value to him as a captain of his fleet than as a
civil administrator. Accordingly at the beginning of 1573 Alfonso de
Caceres Ovando, a temporarily retired judge of the Supreme Court of
Hispaniola, was commissioned to make the customary investigation of
Menendez's administration. He was not, however, appointed to succeed
Menendez as governor, but the latter was left for the time in office.
This was a mark of the high favor in which Menendez was held by the
king; and another token to the same effect was the provision that
Menendez need not personally appear to answer any charges which might be
made against him, but might, if he preferred, send an attorney in his
stead. A third and perhaps still more notable indication of royal favor
was in the fact that when Menendez elected not to appear in person, and
not to send an attorney, but to ignore the whole investigation, he was
not called to task, but was permitted to go without so much as a
reprimand.
The investigation did not take place until November, 1573. Though brief
it was thorough and searching. But it disclosed little that was to the
discredit of Menendez, and nothing that was really serious. He seems to
have been a somewhat gloomy and cruel fanatic, but a man of integrity
and singular loyalty to his sovereign and his faith. He was zealous and
energetic, but better fitted to command a ship or a fleet, or indeed an
army, than to govern a state. Yet in both respects he failed. His chief
concern in Cuba, as we have seen, was to promote her military defences;
but he left La Fuerza incomplete, while the inestimable economic
potentialities of the island were altogether neglected. So in Florida,
he aimed at conquest with the sword and little else; and while he
succeeded in holding the land against French assaults and intrigues, he
did not develop there a colony comparable with those which were being
developed elsewhere in the New World; and he had the mortification of
seeing, in the closing years of his life, French, Dutch and British
privateers swarming in defiance of him the seas which Spain claimed for
her exclusive own.
It was just a month after the beginning of the investigation into his
affairs that Menendez was superseded in office by the appointment as
governor of Cuba of Don Gabriel Montalvo. This gentleman was a nobleman
of great distinction in Spain. He was a Knight of the Order of Saint
James, and he was also high sheriff of the Court of the Holy Inquisition
in the city of Granada. The latter office indicates him to have been a
man after the King's own heart. It remains to be added that Menendez
returned to Spain after being superseded, and died there a few months
later, at Santander; men said, of a broken heart at the enforced
abandonment of his ambitions in Florida.
Little either attractive or grateful is to be found in the record of the
condition of Cuba during the administration of Menendez, or as he left
it to his successor. Rich as the island was in agricultural
possibilities--it might well have been said of Cuba as Douglas Jerrold
said of Australia, "Earth is here so kind, that just tickle her with a
hoe and she laughs with a harvest"--and few as were its inhabitants, it
yet produced not enough to feed those few. It produced nothing with
which to clothe them. After the decline of gold mining, the raising of
cattle became the chief industry; chiefly for their hides, which were an
important article of export. Bayamo was the centre of this industry, and
was also the centre of a thriving but illegitimate commerce.
In fact the whole southeastern part of the Cuban coast was the resort of
contraband traders, who brought thither silks and linens, wines, and
sometimes cargoes of slaves, to exchange without paying tariff duties
for hides and the valuable woods with which Cuba abounded. No attempt
was made, at least with any efficiency, by the governor or the royal
officials at Havana to stop this lawless trade. Now and then, however,
the Supreme Court at Hispaniola interfered, arrested citizens of Bayamo,
Manzanillo, and Santiago itself, and fined them heavily. Then the
government at Havana, which had done nothing to enforce the law,
remonstrated and protested against so much money being taken from Cuba
to Hispaniola.
The island was, nevertheless, making some progress; appropriately enough
through a reversal of the conditions which had formerly involved it in
disaster. The Mexican adventure of Cortez had drawn away from Cuba men
and resources almost to the exhaustion of the island. But now that
country began sending men and means back to Cuba. Cortez had long been
dead, but under his successors the wealth of Mexico was being wondrously
developed, as was indeed that of Peru and other South American
countries. Some of the commerce between South America and Spain went by
other routes, though a considerable portion of it passed by the shores
of Cuba and utilized that island as a stopping place, to its material
benefit. But all the Mexican traffic followed the Cuban route, the most
of it passing along the north coast and making Havana a port of call or
of refuge. Florida, too, which had likewise drawn much from Cuba, was
now sending men and supplies back to the island.
By 1575 Havana was the commercial metropolis of the West Indies, and it
had for some years been the practical capital of the island, though
Santiago continued nominally to enjoy that distinction until 1589.
Vessels from Vera Cruz, bearing the treasures of New Spain, and from
Nombre de Dios, laden with the wealth of Castilla del Oro and of Peru,
thronged the harbor, and contributed to the trade of the city. To meet
the requirements of the thousands of transient visitors, houses in the
city were multiplied in number, and plantations in the suburbs extended
their borders. The people began to realize how profitable a business was
to be conducted in providing supplies of food for the ships' companies.
And while the southeastern part of the island was, as we have seen, in a
backward condition, the northwestern part entered upon an era of
progress and prosperity.