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Cuban sources describe the British retreat from Guantánamo Bay in November 1741 as the product of a heroic Spanish-Cuban military campaign.
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But Francisco Cajigal, Santiago's governor, seems to have recognized how lucky Spain was that Cuba survived the British occupation intact. The safety of the east, indeed, of Cuba itself, could never be secure, Cajigal informed Crown officials the next year, so long as the region remained unpopulated. He commissioned a study of the bay and its surroundings to determine what could be done to ensure that it not fall into enemy hands again. Among other measures, Cajigal proposed constructing defenses at the bay, the costs of which could be borne by exploiting copper deposits back of Santiago. He praised the fertility of the Guantánamo Basin, and criticized its Creole landlords for ignoring the agricultural potential of their vast estates, many of them seemingly abandoned. He also called for the establishment of two towns at strategic locations near the bay, capable of promoting and maintaining local manufactures and markets while
ensuring the security of the entire region. Like the former governor-general Manzaneda's proposal a half century before, Cajigal's proposition fell on not so much deaf as distracted ears. Santiago was now safe, but the War of Jenkins' Ear dragged on in Europe, drawing the attention and resources of the Crown to matters closer to home.
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In ensuing years, others echoed Manzaneda's and Cajigal's calls to populate and develop what the prominent Santiago attorney Nicolas Joseph de Rivera described as “a jewel of the monarchy”âto equally little effect. These proposals illuminate Guantánamo's position in the social fabric of Cuba and anticipate its later uses. Empty, Guantánamo became a void into which Spain and Cuba and even America projected solutions to their pressing problems. Long before refugees from Haiti and Cuba began to crowd the tarmac at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay in the 1990s, Guantánamo functioned as Spain's social safety valve in the New World: as a refuge for displaced settlers from Florida, Santo Domingo, and, eventually, revolutionary Haiti.
In 1757 an informal census of the Guantánamo Basin identified 15 cattle ranches, 24 hog farms, 6 tobacco plantations, a sugar mill, and 419 people in an area of roughly 250 square miles. Formally, most of the land in the region remained the property of a few great lords. The single town mentioned in the census, San Anselmo de los Tiguabos, suffered from disrepair, the destruction of its church unfairly blamed on the British occupation sixteen years before. Like others before him, the author of this tally, Bishop Pedro A. Morell de Santa Cruz, called for the construction of three new towns, an oddâand perhaps particularly Spanishâway of envisioning colonial development.
If we build it they will come
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After 1757 the Guantánamo region began to stir, at least a little. It did so as a result not of top-down and seemingly artificial projects to create towns “on spec,” but of individual initiative. Cuba also got a brief shot in the arm when next the concentrated power of Britain's navy appeared off the coast of Cuba during the Seven Years' War (known to North Americans as the French and Indian War). A yearlong British occupation of Havana threw Cuba open to free trade and inspired a short-lived commercial bonanza that gave merchants and the old landed elite a lesson in the limitations of mercantilism they would never forget. Before the British capture of Havana, Cuba's
political elite had always been able to keep colonial policy tilted in their favor. After the British withdrawal, it was hard to get the genie back in the bottle, not least because the Crown realized that it would be the primary beneficiary of commercial reform.
Besides demonstrating the dynamism of free trade, the British occupation of Havana revealed Cuba's continuing vulnerability to rival attacks. In 1763 the Crown charged Ambrosio de Funes y Villalpando, conde de Ricla and new governor-general of Cuba, with the task of fortifying Havana along with strategic sites along the Cuban coastline. Ricla set to work constructing at Havana what would become upon completion twelve years later the largest fortress in the New World. He also commissioned a careful study of the island. Based on the results, Ricla called for the further liberation of commerce, the encouragement of agricultural production, and the promotion of white migration to the island. Together these initiatives would create the economic vitality on which true security and adherence to law depended.
Ricla's emphasis on
white
migration reflected growing concern about the most salient effect of the British occupation: an end to the Asiento, the contract between Britain and Spain giving Spain a monopoly on the African slave trade, which soon transformed Cuba into the largest slave market in the world. Ricla's desire to whiten Cuba competed with others' sense that the way to stimulate the Cuban economy was to unleash the slave trade. While Ricla was reconnoitering Cuba, a Santiago surveyor named Baltasar DÃaz de Priego presented the Crown with the first practical plan to promote the island's eastern economy. The price of Spain's recovering Havana from England in 1763 had been the ceding of Spanish Florida. When Florida became a colony of Britain, many Spanish colonists abandoned their homes there for Cuba. In Cuba, they sought a place where they could pursue the things they knew how to doânamely, raise cattle and cultivate tobacco and other vegetables. To DÃaz de Priego, the Floridians were just what the Guantánamo region needed to move it toward a market economy. To lure the Floridians east, DÃaz de Priego suggested a series of incentives. For six years the refugees would pay no taxes. They would be granted the right to buy and trade everything but tobacco (the province of a Havana syndicate) anywhere in Cuba.
Finally, they would be permitted to import up to three hundred slaves tax-free. None of this could happen, however, unless Guantánamo Bay had suitable port facilities, and DÃaz de Priego urged the Crown to construct infrastructure worthy of the bay's natural endowments. DÃaz de Priego saw Guantánamo as far more than an auxiliary of Havana or Santiago. Together with Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico, Cartagena, Veracruz, and Havana, Guantánamo would ensure Spanish supremacy in the Caribbean, vanquishing pirates and black marketeers while securing the welfare of the Spain's commercial and naval fleets.
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By now readers may have guessed the outcome. DÃaz de Priego's vision was never realized. The Floridians did not want to settle in the Guantánamo Basin, where blacks outnumbered whites by more than five to one, and where a diminishing population lived an isolated, bleak, subsistence. But when the eastern economy did advance in the early nineteenth century, it advanced along the lines DÃaz de Priego suggested, spurred by the sort of incentives he proposed.
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A set of seemingly unconnected political events combined with an atmosphere of intellectual creativity to finally populate the Guantánamo Basin at the turn of the nineteenth century. By the second half of the eighteenth century, more and more politicians, public figures, and businessmen throughout the Spanish Empire had begun to mimic their counterparts in England and France by showing a greater interest in economic and political reform based on rationalized administration and scientific principles. Extended to colonial policies, this bred skepticism of the old mercantilist premise that the surest way to amass wealth was to wrest it from the ground, and a corresponding openness to free trade. Cuba's yearlong flirtation with the market during the British occupation of 1762â63 had planted the seed of interest. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Cuba became a laboratory for imperial reform and the site of demographic and economic transformation. In 1778 the Bourbon monarchy proved its commitment, solidifying the commercial gains by passing the landmark “free trade law.”
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The new way of thinking spawned new partnerships between former adversaries. The old landed, Spanish-born (peninsular) elite
joined forces with a less established, mostly Cuban-born (Creole) class of merchants and entrepreneurs to form commercial societies such as the Economic Society of Friends of the Country (1792), the Royal Economic Society of Havana (1793), and the Royal Havana Chamber of Agriculture and Commerce (1795). These societies popularized market ideas, demanded infrastructure improvements, and helped establish the technical, administrative, and educational institutions associated with market liberalism.
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Most of this intellectual and commercial activity was centered in Havana and transpired in the west. As always, Santiago and the east lagged behind. Still, the oligarchs of Santiago could not help but notice the new alliances struck and the opportunities created as old estates were divided into sugar, tobacco, and coffee plantations.
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As Spain came to regard Cuba and its other colonies as sources of staple agriculture and markets for domestic manufactures, it updated and tightened its administration, but did so finally sensitive to the need to give as well as to take. The giving took the form not just of more favorable trade terms, but also of the introduction into Cuba of a modern professionalized bureaucracy designed to facilitate commerce. The changing worldview coincided with the importation of some seventy thousand slaves in the last third of the eighteenth century to jump-start the Cuban sugar industry. Between 1764 and 1769, Cuban sugar exports increased to seven times the level of the decade before. In the 1770s sugar exports were five times greater than they had been in the 1760s; between 1789 and 1818, they increased almost tenfold. By 1820, Cuba had become Spain's richest colony and the largest sugar exporter in the world. The rise of Cuban sugar brought improvements in infrastructure, new demand for labor and capital, and a host of associated business and industries.
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Cuba's economic expansion took place amid a series of dramatic political events that further fed the island's economic development, particularly in the east. In 1776 the outbreak of the American Revolution opened the vast American market to Cuban sugar. But the game changer occurred in 1791, when slaves in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, hitherto the most valuable colony in the world and the leading exporter of sugar, burst their chains. Over the next decade and a half, first Britain and then France would try unsuccessfully
to restore slavery in the colony. In the meantime, the black revolution sent French refugees and planters to Cuba in droves, to be followed a few years later by still more refugees when Spain ceded Santo Domingo (eastern Hispaniola) to France, this time uprooting Spanish colonists, who, like the Floridians of 1763, headed straight for Cuba.
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In 1803 and continuing thereafter, the old estates of the Guantánamo Basin were dismembered and parceled out to French and Spanish colonists and others on favorable terms, thus opening them to agriculture. In 1817 a royal decree promoted white settlement in Cuba on especially generous terms. In 1818, Spain opened the port of Havana to free trade. Like the Floridians before them, the Spanish refugees from Santo Domingo refused to settle in the long-neglected Guantánamo Basin, and made instead for Mariel and other towns and cities to the west. But with fewer connections and less to lose, the French stayed, and they took advantage of the available land on favorable terms to establish a foundation of commercial agriculture.
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While the French refugees from Haiti joined a few Dominican exiles to establish coffee, cotton, and sugar plantations and to lay the foundation for Guantánamo City, the Crown itself commissioned one final study designed to propel the Guantánamo Basin into the modern world. The inspiration for what would come known as La Real Comision de Guantánamo (The Royal Commission of Guantánamo), seems to have come from José Solano, marques de Socorro, captain-general of the Spanish navy and former captain-general of Santo Domingo. Like DÃaz de Priego, Solano recognized in Guantánamo a bay every bit the equal of Havana, Veracruz, San Juan, Puerto Bello, and Cartagena. Like DÃaz de Priego, Solano advocated assigning Guantánamo Bay a permanent naval squadron, accompanied by ground troops, which could once and for all rid the east of contraband while defending it from enemy attack.
Solano's appeal was hardly new. Still, coming from the man in charge of the Spanish navy, it was difficult to ignore. Its timing was fortuitous, given the recent Spanish cession of Santo Domingo. With Solano's report still ringing in his ears, Spain's prime minister, Manuel
Godoy, looked to Guantánamo as a potential site for the latest round of refugees. But before settling on Guantánamo, Godoy resolved to learn more about it. At his urging, King Carlos IV constituted the Royal Commission, known colloquially as the Mopox Commission, after JoaquÃn Beltrán de Santa Cruz, conde de Mopox y Jaruco, the man selected to carry it out.
In conception, design, and operation, the Mopox Commission reflected the new intellectual climate in Spain. Though associated with Guantánamo Bay, the commission encompassed all of Cuba, its goal a scientific accounting of the island's natural resources, including flora and fauna, soil and minerals, rivers, harbors, and bays. Detailed diagrams of proposed canals and fortifications accompanied painstaking blueprints of new cities and meticulous sketches of plants and animals. With this information, the Crown expected to modernize Cuba economically, socially, and militarily.
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Determined to secure Cuba's borders and exploit its natural resources, the Mopox Commission was no less committed to saving Cuba from the social conflagration afflicting Haiti. The decades following the British occupation of Havana saw a precipitous rise in Cuba's slave population, and Spain's military leaders had not been idle. The impressive fortification of Havana was matched by the dissemination across Cuba of trained militias and artillery brigades, acknowledged to be among the most effective in the world. So afraid were Spanish officials of black insurrection across the Windward Passage that Cuba's captain-general introduced a law in 1795 prohibiting the immigration of “negroes” from foreign colonies. Spain also contemplated replacing Cuba's African slaves with Indian slaves. The Mopox Commission took the race problem to heart. The cities it proposed were to be white cities, their populations organized into disciplined militias. It was not for commercial purposes only that the commission aimed to knit the country together with a fabric of canals, sea-lanes, and roads. Modern infrastructure would facilitate a rapid militia response.
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