by Hugh Thomas
Velázquez established himself quickly on the far east of Cuba, near Baracoa, which, as “Asunción de Baracoa,” became his first capital. The local Cubans resisted, but their bows and arrows made no headway against the Spaniards. Velázquez soon seized Hatuey, the onetime cacique of La Española.
What happened next is part of Cuban myth. A captured enemy leader had to be executed. No one doubted that. One of the Franciscans offered Hatuey a Christian death and burial, provided he converted to Christianity. Hatuey listened to the arguments and is supposed to have said that if Christianity meant he had to spend eternity in the company of Spaniards, he would prefer not to be baptized. He was accordingly burned, as a pagan.15
The conquest of the island then began. It was not a difficult task, for though Cuba is much larger than La Española, the population was smaller. There were several political entities in Cuba, but they were not used to war except when it was necessary to mount a defense against raids by Caribs. Those were less frequent than in La Española. The Tainos had reached Cuba later than they had the latter island, and its soil was apparently well suited to being tilled by digging sticks. Thus the place had a sense of fertility.
As elsewhere in the Americas, bows and arrows and stones flung by slings were no match for Spanish weapons, including arquebuses, primitive artillery, horses, and even dogs, but above all those long steel swords that even now can cause a shiver of anxiety when we see them in military museums. How curious to imagine all these knights from Cuéllar, and other cities of Old Castile, riding across the beautiful tropical island. Unfortunately, the only real source for the feelings of the conquistadors is the history of Las Casas, who had his own priorities when he came to write his book.16
Velázquez was joined in Cuba by Pánfilo de Narváez, the fair-haired giant who had been second in command to Esquivel in Jamaica. Velázquez had probably known him since childhood because he came from Navalmanzano, a small town between Cuéllar and Segovia. Oviedo says of Narváez that he was a good man and good at war, but Las Casas was dismissive of most of his qualities.17
Narváez arrived in Cuba with a well-armed force of thirty archers. He landed on the south coast of the island and soon joined forces with Velázquez, who set out westward from Baracoa with a hundred infantry and about twenty horsemen. The two moved across what became Oriente Province toward Bayamo, where Narváez, in the vanguard, reported resistance. Velázquez sent him another fifty men, of whom ten were mounted. Narváez was to try to tell the natives that he had come only to see the country, inform them of the allegiance that they owed to Spain, and explain that the Christians’ intentions were to convert, not injure.18
But Narváez could not keep to his instructions (so he said). On one occasion, he was ambushed and (so he reported) had to kill a hundred Tainos, thereby bringing Bayamo under Spanish rule. He followed the escaping natives toward Camagüey, killing a leader named Caguax on the way. The Indians of Camagüey were not unnaturally unenthusiastic about the newcomers. The people of Bayamo, on the other hand, quickly submitted to the Spaniards, offering them bone necklaces as presents.
Narváez returned to Bayamo to find that Velázquez had gone back to Baracoa leaving his young nephew, Juan de Grijalva, another citizen of Cuéllar, in charge, with Las Casas as chaplain. These conquistadors then pressed west again with several hundred men, supported by about a thousand fascinated and strangely willing natives, and they found signs of gold near Camagüey. While passing through a settlement named Cueiba, they had the encouraging experience of finding some natives worshipping an image of the Virgin that some shipwrecked Spaniards had apparently left there. They were reluctant to exchange her for a superior image offered them by Las Casas.
The Spanish strategy was to advance toward a native village, where Las Casas would try to persuade the natives to give up half the place to the Spaniards. They would also be asked to provide food in the shape of meat, fish, and bread. Las Casas would send an interpreter ahead to explain all this.
But at Caonao, near Camagüey, things went badly wrong. It was a large place, with what seemed to be two public squares. As a result of Las Casas’s petition, cassava bread and much fish were prepared for the invaders. Two thousand people gathered and gazed, amazed at the—to them—extraordinary sight of the Spaniards and at their even more astonishing horses, while another five hundred observed from a large house on the square. Las Casas told the natives that the Spaniards wanted to enter that house, but they were offered more chickens to persuade them to remain outside. While the commanders were considering what to do, a certain Spaniard (Las Casas does not name him) ran amok and started killing. The mood was infectious. Narváez’s captains (again we do not have their names) went to the large house and, breaking it open, started more slaughter there, until the street ran with blood. Las Casas saved forty Indians in the square, but his companions went away to join the fighting elsewhere. Narváez sat on his horse, “still as marble,” while this was going on. When he saw Las Casas, he asked, “What do you think of our Spaniards, what they have done?” Las Casas replied: “I offer you and them to the devil.” He bitterly recalled: “I do not remember with how much spilling of human blood that path was marked.”19
After this massacre the Spaniards found no one in their way; the surviving natives of the town tried to escape to islands offshore, though they eventually came back. Las Casas said:
Men and women like sheep, each with his little bundle of poverty on his back.… To see them return caused [me] joy for they were going back to their own homes which was what they wanted, and it caused me pity and great compassion, considering their meekness, humility, and poverty, and what they had suffered, their banishment and their weariness, brought upon them by no fault of their own, the murder of their fathers, sons, brothers, and neighbors so cruelly accomplished—all, all being set aside as done with and forgotten.20
This experience marked a turning point in Las Casas’s attitude toward the policies of his fellow Spaniards. All the same, he did establish a green-turtle farm in a lagoon near Cienfuegos and seems to have remained there during the year of 1512–13. But within a short time he was following the example of Fray Antonio Montesinos, the Dominican of Santo Domingo. This may have been after the arrival in Cuba of three Dominicans from there: Gutierre de Ampudia, Bernardo de Santo Domingo, and Pedro San Martín. One of these is said to have refused Las Casas communion while he possessed slaves. On August 14, 1514, Las Casas denounced the conquest to the settlers in Sancti-Spiritus: “I began to speak to them of their blindness, their injustices, their tyrannies, and their cruelties.”21 Las Casas abandoned his property to Velázquez and devoted the rest of his life to working for the good treatment of Indians. So did his partner in the farm, Pedro de Rentería. The fact that they had seen the savagery of the conquest of Cuba with their own eyes determined their opinions.
Narváez established himself on the north coast of Cuba, where a little more gold was forthcoming. This was probably near Santa Clara (a corruption of the words casa harta, “house replete,” so called because the Spaniards were well fed there, apparently on parrots).
The natives there told of a Spaniard and two women who had long been held prisoner by some of their fellow Tainos. Narváez informed Velázquez, and the latter sent a brigantine along the north coast in search of the missing compatriots. Messengers held up white papers on high poles. Somewhere near Cojímar they found two naked Spanish women. These identified a chief who, they said, had treacherously drowned their companions. The Spaniards were about to burn him, but Las Casas protested, so they kept him as a prisoner in chains, and they went on to a stream whence gold was said to come.22
Another cacique soon came forward to welcome them and to hand over to them the male prisoner, García Mexía, a Castilian from Extremadura who had been lost for several years. He had almost forgotten Spanish, and gesticulated as the Tainos did. He and the two women were, it turned out, survivors from Alonso de Hojeda’s expedition to Urabá in 1506, which had bec
ome separated on its way to Santo Domingo.
Narváez and his men went to meet Velázquez at Xagua, on the site of the modern Cienfuegos, on Christmas 1513. Then Velázquez sent Narváez back to Havana with sixty men and, thereafter, farther west still to what is now Pinar del Río. He returned along the south coast of Cuba, where, in January 1514, he founded Trinidad, of which a brother-in-law of his, Francisco Verdugo, from Cogeces de Iscar, about twelve miles west of Cuéllar, would become the first mayor. Then he sent a ship to Jamaica for cassava bread, and another to Santo Domingo for cattle, mares, and maize. The conquest, in the sense that Castilians could establish themselves wherever they wanted on the island, was complete.
Diego Velázquez continued as governor of Cuba for another eleven years, until 1524. During this time he, with his secretary Cortés at his side, founded the main cities of Cuba, settlements that have remained important to this day: San Salvador de Bayamo (founded in November 1513, though not on the exact present site of Bayamo), Trinidad (established in January 1514), Sancti-Spiritus and Puerto Príncipe (Camagüey), both also towns of 1514, as well as Asunción de Baracoa (1511), Havana, and Santiago. Havana was founded on the south coast of Cuba, near what is now the tiny town of Batabanó. It was later moved, together with its name, to its present site, previously known as Carenas, in order (probably) to meet the demands of shipping when returning home from New Spain via the Bahamas. The traveler to Batabanó will seek in vain for the remains of the first Havana. It is no longer even a legend. The date of the transfer is unclear but it seems to have been begun in 1519 and concluded in 1526.23
All these new cities, as in La Española, were built near to where Taino settlements had been. The paperwork to establish them (never to be neglected in Spanish matters) was probably performed by Hernán Cortés, a trained notary. These places were as usual planned with the same squares, churches, town halls, prisons, and governors’ palaces that characterized the cities of La Española and whose outlines can often still be discerned.24 It was, of course, Indians who actually erected the buildings. Velázquez told the King that those in Cuba were much “more inclined to the matters of our faith than those in La Española or Puerto Rico,” and the King wrote back expressing pleasure.25 Why Velázquez had this impression is obscure. But he always preferred to look on the bright side of things. He was much more tolerant after the early days in Cuba than had seemed at first likely.26
While busy with the foundation of this new colony, Velázquez was challenged by Francisco de Morales, a Sevillano protégé of Diego Colón’s, to whom he had assigned the town of Manzanillo. He was an ardent supporter of the encomienda, as instituted in La Española and which Velázquez had not yet introduced in Cuba. Morales seems to have captured some Cubans in order to press for that conclusion. These natives rebelled, and some Christians were killed. Velázquez seized Morales and sent him as a prisoner to Santo Domingo.27 Among those who appear to have supported Morales was the Governor’s secretary, Hernán Cortés. Velázquez was at first tempted to hang him in consequence, but refrained, though he never worked as his secretary again.
Velázquez soon received permission from Castile to divide up the Indians of Cuba as they had been in La Española. Thus, Morales’s policy was, in fact, pursued after his imprisonment. There were differences from the practice in La Española: to begin with, the Governor allocated Cubans to work for Castilians for a month only, at the end of which time they were sent home to their villages, with food for the journey. Velázquez also sent out expeditions of about twenty Castilians in different places with an interpreter to bring in the natives, who were to be held together in new towns dependent on Spanish landowners. He appointed inspectors whose task was to ensure that they were well treated. The King also sent instructions that the Cubans were to be treated less roughly than their companions had been in La Española and Puerto Rico, saying that he held them “in special esteem” and that he desired to convert them to the Christian faith. Fernando knew that if they were made into enemies, they would not produce much gold. Velázquez, with his usual optimism, reported to the King that the Spaniards were in consequence “satisfied and had lost the ill will that they had incurred.…”28
Soon after, while Velázquez was again in Bayamo, he received a message from the King giving him permission to embark on a general division of Indians, being allowed to act without any consultation with Diego Colón, the formal Governor of all the Indies.
To begin with, Velázquez confined his divisions to Baracoa and Bayamo. Velázquez assigned to each Spaniard a specific cacique who was obliged with his men to serve him, in return for which he was fed, clothed, and instructed in Christianity. The maximum size of an encomienda would be three hundred Indians. That was for officials. Principal citizens would receive a hundred Indians; less important ones, sixty; and minor ones, forty. The royal secretary, Conchillos, and Diego Colón were among the absentees who received good allocations. Usually, though, the encomenderos were settlers, which meant that the Spaniards had the right to the land as well.29 In addition to Indian tenant laborers there were, as usual, slaves: men and a few women taken in war.
In Cuba, as in La Española, the indigenous population soon began to decline. Some black African slaves had probably been brought in to replace Indians as laborers. But as in Santo Domingo, a Caribbean slave trade preceded the arrival of the Africans, many Indians being seized from those “useless” islands, the Bahamas, as well as from tierra firme, in this case from Darien/Panama or elsewhere in that doomed region.
Velázquez was in some ways original since, alone of early Spanish governors, he encouraged the growing of indigenous crops by the conquistadors. Proconsuls elsewhere had hesitated to do that, but the Governor of Cuba had no inhibitions about ordering the planting of cassava, maize, sweet potato, and malanga—a farinaceous root still much consumed in Cuba—as well as of rice. He also brought in sheep, pigs, and cattle. These animals multiplied fast. Velázquez boasted to the King that the small herd of a hundred long-legged swine that he had had to begin with had turned into thirty thousand in three years. Horses were also bred. To the conquistadors, the increase in the number of animals seemed to make up for the decline in the number of Indians.
Some gold was produced; Hernán Cortés and a friend of his, Francisco Dávila, for example, made fortunes near Baracoa in the first few years of Spanish occupation. Gold was also found near what is now Cienfuegos, in the valley of the Rio Arimao, a discovery that acted as a magnet for the emigration of many frustrated Spaniards in La Española.
Sometime before mid-April 1515, Velázquez moved his capital from Baracoa to the settlement that he and Cortés had already named “Santiago de Cuba,” on the edge of a fine bay on the south coast. The Governor considered, but in the end rejected, the idea of establishing this headquarters halfway up the island, for example, at Trinidad, on the Bay of Xagua. Soon he would begin to build the house of stone in Santiago that is still associated with his name, but for the moment he improvised a wooden palace. The King declared that he wanted this settlement to be a permanent one, and other houses for long-term habitation began to be constructed. Married conquistadors sent for their wives from Spain. Velázquez established a warehouse to house the King’s share of the proceeds—the royal fifth, the quinto—from the country. Velázquez thereafter presided over a little court in Santiago, mostly of adventurers who hailed originally from his own part of Castile—many of them relations, including at least three others who shared his surname.
A prominent member of Velázquez’s court continued to be Cristóbal de Cuéllar, the treasurer. Since the Governor had married María de Cuéllar soon after he arrived in Cuba, Cuéllar had once been Velázquez’s father-in-law. She in her turn had come to the Indies as one of the maids of honor of the wife of Diego Colón. Her wedding to Velázquez was the first Christian one on the island, but the bride died within a week.
The friends of Velázquez’s who began to gather for nightly discussions at his home in Santiago de Cub
a included Andrés de Duero, a tiny man from Tudela de Duero, secretary to the Governor in succession to Cortés; and also Amador de Lares, the Governor’s accountant, who whenever asked (and often when not) would recall the days when he had been in the courtly household of the Gran Capitán, Fernández de Córdoba, in Italy. Occasionally, Velázquez himself would joke that when he returned to Spain, he would marry again, this time one of the two rich nieces of his patron, the Bishop of Burgos. No one seems to have had the heart to tell Don Diego that those nieces, by then middle-aged, had both long ago married. Sometimes the ex-secretary, Hernán Cortés, would be seen at these tertulias. Forgiven by Velázquez, he became a magistrate on the town council of Santiago. Courteous, even sycophantic, but obviously independent of spirit, “Cortesito,” as his enemies in Cuba called him, was a prudent participant in these discussions.
Occasionally one or another of the Genoese merchants, a Riberol or a Centurione, who had by then developed interests in Cuba as they had in Santo Domingo and Puerto Rico, probably joined in these talks. Some of these merchants had obtained permission to live in the Indies, though others among them seem to have decided that it was not necessary to go through that formality. One or two conversos, such as Bernardino de Santa Clara, who may have come to the New World in the hope of escaping the attention of the Inquisition, might also have been present. (Santa Clara’s brother had been that treasurer of Santo Domingo who had once filled the saltcellars at a banquet with gold dust instead of salt.) Velázquez, as befitted a tropical monarch, also had a buffoon, Francesillo, on hand to tell him disagreeable home truths in the form of jests.
These and other friends of Velázquez’s would often smoke the new American herb tobacco, which they bought from the Indians, when they met to discuss the problems of the day. This plant would begin to be smoked at home in Spain also, and its famous names, “cigar” (cigarro) and “cigarette” (cigarrillo) would soon become attached to it because tobacco was smoked in cigarrales outside Toledo—little summerhouses so called because after dinner the call of the cicada (cigarra) was so insistent.