Bolivar: American Liberator

by Arana, Marie

  Bolívar immediately sought out fellow republicans in hopes of reconstituting the army and mounting a new front against Monteverde, but it was increasingly clear that the moment had been lost. Many of those men had gathered their families and headed for the port, frightened by the swift collapse of the republic and rumors of violence that accompanied Monteverde’s arrival. But the clamor to emigrate, as Bolívar soon found when he rushed back to La Guaira to witness the situation firsthand, had been foiled by Miranda himself: for four days now, republicans had swarmed over the mountain and onto the docks, ready to board ships, only to learn that the generalísimo had ordered the port closed. Colonel Manuel María de Las Casas, the port’s commandant, told them categorically that no vessel could leave until Miranda himself had sailed. Frustrated, fuming, Bolívar and his cohort awaited the generalísimo’s arrival and considered how best to foil his escape.

  On July 30, the evening that Miranda was to make his getaway, the dusty remains of the port of La Guaira bustled with fretful life. A suffocating heat was finally beginning to lift and, through the gaping doorways of improvised inns, one could see the gathering multitudes—pacing, nervous, eager to make their escape. The dim light of lanterns revealed the miserable lot: sailors whose ships had been grounded; soldiers stripped of their weapons; officers with no authority; worried mothers; weeping children. Out in the noisy streets, servants hauled trunks; mules stumbled through rubble; hulking stevedores offered their services. The sea, ruffled by a rising night breeze, began to grow agitated, and the ships bobbed upon it, trying the seamen’s legs.

  Miranda’s baggage had been sent to La Guaira fifteen days before, and it awaited him now, on board the HMS Sapphire, the very ship that had borne Bolívar, flush with excitement, from London. Now, two years and a revolution later, the corvette’s captain, Henry Haynes, was eager to board the old rebel and depart the ruins of the republic. As soon as the generalísimo arrived at the port commandant’s house at seven o’clock that evening, Captain Haynes went to implore him to lift the embargo and board the ship at once. Miranda responded that he was much too exhausted to put to sea right away. Once inside Commandant Las Casas’s quarters in the spacious, magnificent old Guipuzcoana building, he made himself comfortable. Las Casas invited him to stay for dinner, encouraging him to spend the night. Miranda was assured that the 22,000 pesos that had been promised were now aboard the Sapphire, in the hands of a British agent. All was ready for his departure, his host assured him, but there was absolutely no reason to leave before morning.

  Miranda sat down to dinner with Las Casas and the governor of La Guaira, Miguel Peña. Joining them were Miranda’s aide Carlos Soublette and Pedro Gual (nephew of Manuel Gual), his former secretary. They discussed the terms of the capitulation, with Gual stubbornly doubting that Spain would live up to them. Miranda rudely dismissed his concerns; Spain was too distracted by war to be able to keep a strong hold on Venezuela, he said gruffly. His hope in time was to ally with New Granada and reenter Caracas from Cartagena. With such dreams did the old generalísimo take to his bed, as Soublette lit his way and promised to wake him early in the morning.

  But a nightmare of betrayals was about to descend on Miranda. Colonel Las Casas, in an attempt to ingratiate himself with his new master, had already communicated with Monteverde. The commandant knew that it would not be long before the Spanish arrived and took control of the port. He had confided as much to Governor Peña. But there were other schemes at work. Days before, Bolívar and his angry cohort had sought out Las Casas and Peña to persuade them to prevent Miranda from departing Venezuela. Now, with that deed accomplished and Miranda fast asleep in the other room, twelve conspirators—Bolívar among them—gathered in Las Casas’s house to decide what to do. A passionate discussion followed, in which all the bitterness they had long harbored against Miranda was unleashed. They spoke of his contempt for his countrymen, his past service for France and England, the potential profits that awaited him on board the Sapphire. How was it that an English captain had emerged so conveniently out of the sea to rush Miranda to safety? How could anyone be sure that Miranda was not colluding with England and Spain now that they were allies? And why had the Marquis de Casa León (who had since become one of Monteverde’s most prominent advisors) been asked to procure so hefty a monetary reward? Perhaps most puzzling of all: if Miranda trusted Monteverde to honor the terms of surrender, why was he unwilling to stay and see those terms enforced?

  By three in the morning, the twelve had come to a decision. They would arrest their former leader, charge him with treason, and, with the men available to them in La Guaira, mount an attack on Monteverde. Las Casas seemed to go along with it. He put his troops on alert, soldiers surrounded the house, and one of the conspirators raced up the mountain to prepare the dungeon at the fortress of San Carlos. Bolívar and a cohort rousted Carlos Soublette from sleep and ordered him to take them to Miranda’s bed. The generalísimo was in a deep slumber when Soublette rapped on the door. “Too soon!” Miranda growled, misunderstanding the aide’s intent. But he quickly understood that the men at Soublette’s side wanted his urgent attention. “Tell them to wait,” Miranda said. Bolívar and Tomás Montilla stood by tranquilly, confident that enough guards had circled the building to secure it from any ambush. After a few minutes, the door swung open and they saw the generalísimo impeccably dressed and groomed, preternaturally calm. Without preamble or courtesies, Bolívar told him he was being taken prisoner. Miranda seized the hand in which Soublette held the lantern, and thrust it high, so as to study each of his captors’ faces. “Ruffians! Ruffians!” he sighed, putting it down again. “All you know is how to make trouble.” Without another word, he strolled to the front door of the Guipuzcoana building and out into the warm night, submitting easily to the guards who escorted him to the mountain fortress. It was early, July 31, before dawn.

  As soon as he received confirmation that Miranda was chained to a wall in the dungeon of San Carlos, Governor Peña set out for Caracas to give Monteverde the news. But as night met the first light of day, he encountered a party of couriers in full Spanish regalia, riding in the other direction. The communiqué they carried, which the duplicitous Las Casas had been expecting, demanded a lockdown of the port. No ship, no traveler, no citizen of any nation could leave La Guaira without the express approval of Venezuela’s new leader. The edict was a clear breach of the terms of surrender. They were all Monteverde’s prisoners now.

  Colonel Las Casas wasted no time in instructing his soldiers to lower the republican colors and raise the Spanish flag. “It’s no small surprise to me,” Captain Haynes snipped at Las Casas, “to see that in the course of a few hours you have changed loyalties completely.” Haynes’s ship, the Sapphire, eventually managed to slip away, along with Miranda’s money. The USS Matilda, which had brought relief supplies after the earthquake, also made an escape, but not without vigorous rounds of cannon fire in its wake. Somehow, in the confusion, Bolívar, too, succeeded in evading capture. He hastily improvised a disguise and, in the cover of night, rode off into the trees—up, past the cliffs—toward Caracas.

  Miranda was not so fortunate. After months in the impenetrable citadel of San Carlos, the visionary who had once dined with the likes of Jefferson and Washington, and romanced the empress of Russia, was taken from his vault and thrust into the dank crypts of Puerto Cabello, where he languished for another half year, contemplating the harsh mill of fortune. There, he wrote letters to everyone he could think of, railed bitterly against the perfidy of Monteverde’s promises; and to get attention even claimed to be in the service of the English crown. On June 4, 1813, he was hustled onto a shabby little boat and shipped off to Morro Castle in Puerto Rico, and eventually to the dread rat-infested dungeon of La Carraca outside Cádiz, where he died three years later with an iron collar around his neck. His corpse was dumped in a mass grave, along with those of a cartload of common criminals.

  THE THEME OF BETRAYAL IS never far from any story of
revolution; deceit is at the very heart of radical upheaval. But history has not looked kindly on the events that unraveled on that early morning in La Guaira. For all the glory that would accrue to Bolívar, he would never be free of the stain of Miranda’s fate. He had lured an old man to a revolution, and, after its failure, delivered him into enemy hands. There can be no doubt that it was a monstrous act of deception.

  But there was no shortage of deceit on all sides. The patriots had been taken in by Miranda’s swagger and braggadocio—had invested all their hopes in him—and they reacted now with all the fury of the betrayed. The leader they had trusted to guide them through the vicissitudes of revolution had turned out to be more comfortable with failure than with victory. Faltering and indecisive in the face of clear advantage, he always managed to be magnificent in the face of defeat. His fellow rebels believed they were seeing him now as he really was: a fraud who could only shrink from battle; a tinhorn general incapable of a strong will. Alexander Scott, a special consul from the United States, overseeing relief supplies after the earthquake, sent a report to Secretary of State James Monroe that reflected the common view: “Miranda by a shameful and treacherous capitulation surrendered the liberties of his country. Whether he was an agent of the British Government as he now states, or whether this conduct resulted from a base and cowardly heart, I cannot decide. . . . He is a brutal, capricious tyrant destitute of courage, honor, and abilities.” Miranda’s minions were equally scathing, labeling him an outright coward whose behavior, when not absurd, was nothing short of treasonous. To them, the secret negotiations had been unforgivable. The reward of money, obscene.

  With time, historians have grown more generous toward Miranda. He is considered the “Proto-leader” or Grand Precursor—a visionary without whom Latin American dreams of independence might never have begun. Certainly, he was, as many biographers have depicted him, a master of promotion, far more skilled at plotting grand schemes than effecting their practical implementation. For him, as one biographer put it, the hatching of revolutions was a profession, and he performed it well. No one can doubt Miranda’s love of country and his lifelong efforts to see it free. It is why, today, he is a beloved if complicated figure of Latin American history. His splendid memorial in the National Pantheon of Caracas is a triumph of resurrection.

  But in Miranda’s own time, Caracas received the news of his surrender with resounding invective; in Valencia and Coró, royalists celebrated in the streets. Bolívar, having lived and relived the anguish of his failure in Puerto Cabello, felt the general’s defection all the more keenly. Had Bolívar suffered the torments of the damned—begged for an opportunity to clear his honor—only to see all hopes dashed with a craven signature? He could not forgive Miranda, and, unlike future generations of Venezuelans, he would never change his mind. To him, Miranda was “a loathsome leader, despot, arbitrary in the extreme, obsessed with his own ambitions and cravings, who either never understood the stakes or was all too happy to relinquish his country’s liberty.” Bolívar was so convinced that the generalísimo deserved to rot in Spain’s dungeons that he never ceased to trumpet his part in the deed. Twenty years later, one of his aides, Belford H. Wilson, wrote to another aide, Daniel O’Leary: “To the last hour of his life he rejoiced of that event, which, he always asserted, was solely his own act, to punish the treachery and treason of Miranda in capitulating to an inferior force, and then intending to embark, himself knowing the capitulation would not be observed.” Later, Wilson wrote again: “General Bolívar invariably added, that he wished to shoot Miranda as a traitor, but was withheld by others.”

  As ironic as it seems—and those days were rife with irony—when Bolívar slipped past the Spanish sentinels that night, into the heart of Caracas, he found himself seeking refuge in the house of the very man who had negotiated Miranda’s surrender to Monteverde: the Marquis de Casa León. He had known the marquis and his brother since childhood and was confident he could find shelter there. He also knew that, for a leader of the republican effort, there was no safer place in all Caracas than the home of a Spaniard who had ingratiated himself with the crown.

  The marquis welcomed him and immediately confided his whereabouts to a fellow Spaniard, Francisco Iturbe, who not only was an old family friend of Bolívar’s, but an official of the crown and, so, on excellent terms with Monteverde. Iturbe was also a kind man with a large heart, and learning of Bolívar’s predicament put all politics aside to approach the new governor and request a passport for the young lieutenant colonel. It was a bold request in a roiling time: Caracas was under siege, its houses raided for goods, its patriots snatched from their beds and marched off to prisons in chains. Conditions became so crowded in the prisons that, to make room for more, guards flung alkali against the walls, asphyxiating prisoners in their cells. The day after Miranda was taken prisoner, the proud canon Cortés de Madariaga was pulled from a fleeing boat and severely beaten. The author of the republic’s constitution, Juan Germán Roscio, was bound hand and foot and thrust into stocks to be publicly humiliated. Six of the most respected republican leaders were tied to mules, dragged through the mud, and cast unceremoniously into the foul cells of La Guaira. Eventually, they were shipped to the dungeons of Cádiz along with a document that described them as “eight monsters—root and spring of all the new-fangled evils in America that have terrorized the world.”

  This was the Caracas through which Iturbe spirited Bolívar to a meeting with Monteverde. One thousand five hundred revolutionary leaders would be hauled off to prison in the time it would take for Spain to reestablish itself in the colony. If the earthquake had demolished the city, the reconquest would extinguish its spirit. Bolívar, too, might have been marched off to die in the dungeons of Puerto Cabello or Cádiz, but for the long and complicated relationships between his prominent family and the royalists of Caracas. As it was, Iturbe saved his life.

  When Iturbe first spoke on Bolívar’s behalf, offering himself as a guarantee, Monteverde waved him away, claiming to have in his hands a report that described Bolívar as a rabid patriot who had held Puerto Cabello against Spain. But Iturbe persisted, bringing Bolívar into Monteverde’s office and introducing him in the most passionate terms, “Here is the commander of Puerto Cabello, Don Simón Bolívar, for whom I have offered my personal guarantee. If he meets with any harm, I will suffer. I vouch for him with my life.”

  “All right,” Monteverde replied, and then, eyeing Bolívar, told his secretary, “Issue this man a pass as a reward for services rendered the King when he imprisoned Miranda.” Bolívar had pledged to be quiet and let Iturbe do all the talking, but he found it impossible now to hold his tongue. “I arrested Miranda because he was a traitor to his country, not in order to serve the King!” he said emphatically. Monteverde was taken aback and, in a pique, threatened to cancel the pass. But Iturbe gently insisted that the governor had already agreed to it, and then he added good-humoredly to the secretary, “Go on! Pay no attention to this scamp. Give him his passport and be done with it.”

  On August 27, Bolívar sailed for Curaçao on the Spanish schooner Jesús, María y San José, accompanied by a manservant, a few trunks, and his young uncles José Félix and Francisco Ribas. He had left all his property, or what remained of it, in the hands of his sister Juana. The royalists, drunk with success at their easy victory, rang down a final curtain on the first republic. As they applied themselves to the bloody work of purging the colony of its rebels, Monteverde had no notion that, in releasing Bolívar, he had unleashed the most dangerous rebel of all. It is said that whenever Bolívar’s name was mentioned in the chaotic months that followed, the governor’s face turned a deathly white.

  CHAPTER 6

  Glimpses of Glory

  The art of victory is learned in failures.

  —Simón Bolívar

  Even as the troubled coast of his homeland receded in the distance, Bolívar began plotting his return. But the sea itself reminded him how tenuous his life had be
come: Storms bedeviled his journey, and when at last his ship dragged into the British port of Curaçao, he was met with yet more turmoil. The customs officials were singularly inhospitable; they confiscated his baggage, took his money, and held him liable for a debt owed the ship that had ferried him away from Puerto Cabello. Worse, he learned that Monteverde had violated the conditions of Miranda’s surrender by appropriating all Venezuelan property owned by rebel leaders. His mines, his land, his haciendas were no longer his. Bolívar wrote to Iturbe, asking him to intercede on his behalf. He was beginning to see his straitened circumstances “with no little horror.” His personal wealth had bought him a way into the revolution; he needed his properties in order to fund his way back.

  Two months of enforced idleness on the dry, torrid shores of Curaçao had a profound effect on Bolívar. For the first time, he was in a foreign place that had few entertainments. In the sleepy capital of Willemstad, there were no salons with bracing conversations, no stimulating sights apart from the dazzling carmine sunsets, no men of wide influence or matters of historical moment. Marooned with his fellow soldiers, he had little to do but contemplate their failed attempt to defend the new republic: Why had it gone so wrong? What might have been?

  By late October, he had secured a loan from a friendly merchant and, with his small band of warrior comrades, set sail for New Granada, where, as they understood it, the flag of independence still waved. The Bolívar who stepped off the boat in the port of Cartagena was an entirely different man. Tempered by war, sobered by defeat, he seemed more deliberate, judicious, mature. It was as if all the missteps and catastrophes of the past two years had brought the realities of liberation into sharp relief. In light of this hard-won wisdom, he had begun to organize his ideas and—following a rigorous discipline he would maintain for the rest of his life—set them down on paper. Along with the few personal effects he carried onshore on that crisp November day in 1812 was the full awareness that, in the heat of a revolution, words were as valuable as weapons.