We must consider, in order rightly to understand the situation of Cuba
at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the momentous train of
incidents in her history which then began, the salient features of the
history of Spain at that time. The reign of Charles III. had temporarily
restored Spain to a place in the front rank of European powers, with
particularly close relations, through the Bourbon crowns of the two
countries, with France. But that rank was of brief duration. In 1788
Charles IV. came to the throne, one of the weakest, most vacillating and
most ignoble of princes, who was content to let his kingdom be governed
for him by his wife's notorious lover. A few years later the Bourbon
crown of France was sent to the guillotine, and then came the deluge, in
which Spain was overwhelmed and entirely wrecked.
The first Treaty of San Ildefonso in 1796 made Spain little better than
the vassal of France in the latter's war against Great Britain. That was
the work of Godoy, the "Prince of the Peace" and the paramour of the
queen. Against him Spain revolted in 1798 and he was forced to retire
from office, only to be restored to it by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1800.
Then came the second secret and scandalous Treaty of San Ildefonso, in
which Spain was the merest tool and dupe of France, or of Napoleon; and
in 1803 there followed another international compact under which Spain
agreed to pay France a considerable yearly subsidy. A few years later
occurred the French invasion, the abdication of Charles IV., the
accession, then merely nominal, of Ferdinand VII., the imposition of
Joseph Bonaparte, and the Peninsular War.
The effect of these events was two-fold, the two parts strongly
contrasting. On the one hand, the Spanish national spirit was aroused as
it had not been for many years. Napoleon's aggressions went too far. His
ambition overleaped itself. In their resistance and resentment the
Spanish people "found themselves" and rose to heights of patriotism
which they had not scaled before. Concurrently they began the
development of a liberal and progressive spirit of inestimable
significance. They demanded a constitution and the abolition of old
abuses which for generations had been stifling the life of the
Peninsula.
On the other hand, the prestige of Spain in her trans-Atlantic colonies
was hopelessly impaired, and her physical power to maintain her
authority in them was destroyed. With French and British armies making
the Peninsula their fighting ground, Spain had no armies to spare for
the suppression of Central and South American rebellions. Thus while
there was an auspicious renascence of national vigor at home, there was
an ominous decline of imperial authority abroad. The work of Miranda,
San Martin and Bolivar was thus facilitated and assured of success.
In domestic affairs, Spain showed some progress, even under her worst
rulers. Godoy, vile as he was, abolished the savagery of bull-fighting
and promoted the policing of cities and the paving and cleaning of
streets, some advance was made in popular education, and the
intellectual life of the nation began to emerge from the eclipse which
it had been suffering. Possibly the most significant achievement of all
was the development of an approximation to popular government, with an
attempt to unify Spain and the colonies; which latter came too late. The
Junta Central in January, 1809, declared that the American colonies were
an integral part of the Spanish Kingdom, and were not mere appanages of
the crown. This was revolutionary, but it was insisted upon by the
Junta, and practical steps were taken to make the principle effective.
The Junta was driven from Seville by Napoleon, whereupon it fled to
Cadiz, and there, in superb defiance of the invader and oppressor,
arranged for the assembling of a Cortes, or National Parliament, in
which the colonies should be fully represented. This body, a single
chamber, met in September, 1810, with elected representatives from the
American colonies, including Cuba. Owing to the difficulty of getting
deputies from America in time, however, men were selected in Spain to
represent the colonies at the opening of the session.
A tangled skein of history followed. The Cortes, though far from radical
in tone, was progressive and was sincerely devoted to the principle of
popular government, and it insisted upon the adoption of the
Constitution of 1812, under which the people were made supreme, with the
crown and the church in subordinate places. All Spaniards, in America as
well as in Europe, were citizens of the kingdom, and were entitled to
vote for members of the Cortes and were protected by a bill of rights.
In many respects it was one of the most liberal and enlightened
constitutions then existing in the world.
The first act of the wretched Ferdinand VII., however, when Napoleon
permitted him to return to Spain, was to decree the abrogation of this
constitution and the establishment of a most repressive and reactionary
régime which liberals were cruelly persecuted. The result of this was
to promote the revolution which had already begun in America, and to
provoke a revolution in the Peninsula itself; in the face of which
latter Ferdinand pretended to yield and to consent to the summoning of
another Cortes and the reestablishment of the Constitution of 1812.
These things were effected in 1820. But the false and fickle Ferdinand
made his appeal to the reactionary sovereigns of the Holy Alliance, with
the result that in 1823 the French invaded Spain to suppress Liberalism,
and those preparations were made for the resubjugation of Spain's
American colonies which were frustrated by the promulgation of the
Monroe Doctrine in the United States.
Meantime all the Spanish colonies on the American continents had not
only declared but had actually achieved their independence. There were
left to Spain in all the Western Hemisphere, therefore, only the islands
of Cuba and Porto Rico; and they remained intensely loyal. When the
legitimate King of Spain was deposed in favor of Joseph Bonaparte, Cuba
made it plain and emphatic that she would not recognize the French
usurper, but would remain true to Ferdinand VII. Again, when the
colonies of Central and South America seceded and declared their
independence, Cuba remained loyal to the kingdom. It was because of
these two acts that Cuba became known at the Spanish Court as "Our Ever
Faithful Isle."
For this contrast between Cuba and the rest of Spanish America there
were three major reasons. One was, the insular position of Cuba, which
separated her from the other Spanish provinces and their direct
influence and cooperation, and which thus placed her at an enormous
disadvantage for any revolutionary undertakings. The second was the
character of the people. The Spanish settlers of Cuba had come chiefly
from Andalusia and Estremadura, and were the very flower of the Iberian
race, and from them had descended those who after three centuries were
entitled to be regarded as the Cuban people. They retained unimpaired
the finest qualities of the great race that in the sixteenth century had
made Spain all but the mistress of the world, and they still cherished a
chivalric loyalty to the spirit and the traditions of that wondrous age.
In other colonies the settlement was more varied. Men had flocked in
from Galicia and Catalonia, with a spirit radically different from that
of Andalusians and Estremadurans. To this day the contrast between
Cubans and the people of any other Latin-American state is obvious and
unmistakable.
The third reason was this, that in the years, perhaps a full generation,
preceding the South and Central American revolt, Spain had manifested
toward Cuba a disposition and actual practices well calculated to
confirm that country in its loyalty and in its expectation of enjoying
liberty and prosperity under the Spanish crown in an age of Spanish
renascence. With the brief English occupation, indeed, the modern
history of Cuba began in circumstances of the most auspicious character.
The English opened Havana to the trade of the world and caused it to
realize what its possibilities were of future expansion and greatness.
Then the Spanish government, reestablished throughout the island, for a
time showed Cuba marked favor. The old-time trade monopoly, which had
been destroyed by the English, was abandoned in favor of a liberal and
enlightened policy. Commerce, industry and agriculture were encouraged,
even with bounties. Cuba was made to feel that there were very practical
advantages in being a colony of Spain.
Moreover, the island enjoyed a succession of capable and liberal
governors, or captains-general; notably Luis de las Casas at the end of
the eighteenth century, and the Marquis de Someruelos in the first dozen
years of the nineteenth century. Under benevolent administrators and
beneficent laws, and with Spain herself adopting the liberal
constitution of 1812, Cuba had good cause to remain loyal to the Spanish
connection.
But these very same conditions and circumstances ultimately made Cuba
supremely resolute in her efforts for independence. The men of
Andalusian and Estremaduran ancestry had been loyal to Spain, but they
were just as resolute in their loyalty to Cuba when they were once
convinced that there must be a breach of relations. The same
characteristics that made their ancestors the leaders of the Spanish
race in adventure and in conquest made them now equally ready to be
leaders in the great adventure of conquering the independence of Cuba
from Spain. And if the liberal laws and policy of Spain, and the
Constitution of 1812, had greatly commended Spanish government to them,
the restored Spanish king's flat repudiation of all those things equally
condemned that government.
We must therefore reckon the rise of the spirit of Cuban independence
from the date on which Ferdinand VII. repudiated the constitution which
he had sworn to defend. From 1812 to 1820 that spirit passed through the
period of gestation, and in the years following the latter date it was
born and began to make its vitality manifest. The king's pretended
repentance and readoption of the Constitution of 1812 in 1820 came too
late, and when it was followed by several years of alternating weakness
and violence, and by the French intervention in 1823, the Cuban
resolution for independence was formed. To that resolution, once formed,
Cuba clung with a persistence which for the third time entitled her to
the name of "Ever Faithful Isle." But now it was to herself that she was
faithful.
[Illustration: JUAN JOSÉ DIAZ ESPADA
Born at Arroyave, Spain, on April 20, 1756, and educated at Salamanca,
Juan José Diaz Espada y Landa entered the priesthood of the Roman
Catholic Church, and on January 1, 1800, was Bishop of Cuba. Much more
than a mere churchman, he applied himself with singular ability and
energy to the promotion of the mental and physical welfare of the people
as well as to their religious culture. He strongly assisted Dr. Tomas
Romay in introducing vaccination into the island and in the prosecution
of other sanitary measures, and was one of the foremost patrons of
education. He also gave much attention to the correction of abuses which
had grown up in the ecclesiastical administration. He died on August 13,
1832, leaving a record for good works second to that of no other
ecclesiastic in the history of Cuba.]
Seldom, indeed, has there been an era in the history of the world more
strongly suited to cause the rise of a revolutionary spirit in such a
people as the Cubans, than was the early part of the nineteenth century.
We have already referred to the United States of America and its
attitude toward Cuba and Cuban affairs. That country had achieved its
independence in circumstances scarcely more favorable than would be
those of a Cuban revolt; and it presently waged another war which made
it formidable among the nations. On the other hand, all Europe was in
war-ridden chaos, with the rights of peoples to self-determination made
a sport of autocrats. There was nothing more evident than that
republicanism was the policy of order, stability and progress. The
United States had just forced Spain to sell Louisiana to France, and
then had forced France to sell it to itself. That was an object lesson
which was not lost upon thoughtful Cubans any more than upon the peoples
of Central and South America. It demonstrated that the power of Spain
was waning, and that the dominant power in the western world was that of
Republicanism. And Cubans, as well as others, were not blind to the
practical advantages of being on the winning side.
Indeed, before that Cuba had had another great object lesson. At the
middle of the eighteenth century the English had seized Havana. That in
itself indicated clearly the decline of Spain and her inability to
protect or even to hold her own colonies. But the English force which
achieved that stroke was by no means purely English. It was largely
composed of Americans, soldiers from the British Colonies in North
America who were, of course, British subjects but who were more and more
calling themselves Americans; and who in course of time altogether
rejected British rule and established an independent republic. First,
then, Spain was beaten by England; and next England was beaten by the
United States. Obviously the latter was the power to whom to look for
guidance and support.
There were still other circumstances making toward the same end. We have
remarked upon the puissant opulence of Spanish intellectuality in the
first century of her possession of Cuba, and upon, also, the paucity of
native Cuban achievements in letters. But in the seventeenth century a
decline of Spanish letters and art began, with ominous progression,
until at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the
nineteenth the very nadir of intellectual life had been reached. This
was the more noteworthy and the more significant because of the contrast
which the Peninsula thus presented to other lands. Elsewhere throughout
Europe and in America that was an era of great and splendid intellectual
activity. In almost every department of letters, science and art fine
deeds, original and creative, were being done. The colossal military
operations that convulsed the world from the beginning of the American
Revolution to the fall of Napoleon sometimes blind our eyes and deaden
our ears to what was then done in the higher walks of life; but the fact
is that probably in no other equal space of time in the world's history
was the mind of man more fecund, in both theory and practice.
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.