CHAPTER XVI

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.

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.