Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [114]
Ana couldn’t, however, stop cultivation. Cane required twelve to eighteen months to mature, and by the time it was ready for harvest, prices might be higher. In the meantime, she needed more cattle, equipment, and tools for clearing and tilling new fields. The scarcity of workers, however, was the biggest challenge facing her.
She was aware that forces beyond the borders of Los Gemelos were changing the way hacendados operated. A growing Creole professional and liberal elite in Puerto Rico was pressuring for greater autonomy from Spain and the abolition of slavery, both opposed by sugar hacendados and conservative agriculturalists. Many of those were refugees who’d lost much during the wars for independence in South America and now depended on a stable, controllable labor force. On the other side of the Atlantic, the Peninsular authorities were also concerned about the campesinos—a growing, self-reliant, racially mixed, unsettled, underemployed population who managed to evade taxes, customs, and fees through the barter system and contraband.
Governor de la Pezuela, who’d repealed the Bando Negro in 1848, instituted a new law, ostensibly to eradicate vagrancy in Puerto Rico, but whose object was to create a labor source for the sugar industry and to control the movement of campesinos. The Reglamento de Jornaleros obliged every hombre libre, any white or black who’d never been a slave, and every liberto, or freed slave, to prove that they were gainfully employed. To monitor whether they complied, the Régimen de la Libreta was designed. Every free person aged sixteen to sixty must carry a workbook—la libreta—specifying when and where they worked. If they couldn’t prove they had a job, or that they were exempt from la libreta because they owned and cultivated at least four cuerdas of land, they could be reported to the authorities, fined, jailed, and/or forced to labor in the nearest plantations. If not needed there, they could be assigned to the government’s public works, sometimes far from their hometowns.
But even with these measures, the scarcity of workers was a constant headache for hacendados like Ana. Jíbaros, unwilling to work in sugar, fled to coffee estates in the mountains. Without enough workers, the slaves were forced to toil beyond exhaustion.
Hacendados also struggled with the need for credit to keep their haciendas viable. Ana was in a better position than others. She had her grandfather’s legacy, kept from Ramón and, except for the payments to don Luis, unspent.
She wrote to her parents to notify them that she was now a widow, and that her father-in-law had made generous provision for her and for Miguel. She felt no need to give them more details and was certain they wanted none. Her mother’s infrequent letters were filled with the stock phrases of ladies’ correspondence and novelistic sentiments that Ana abhorred. And her father sent his regards through Jesusa’s messages. Ana was alone in the world and knew it. She took pride in never having asked for anything from her father, mother, or anyone else. The challenges ahead energized her. She rose with the sun, just as ever, tied up her long, black hair, and was confident that no man could claim to be smarter, braver, or more hardworking than she was. She was, she was sure, on the brink of great things.
Two months before the 1850 harvest, Ana projected that Hacienda los Gemelos would show another loss. In preparation for the zafra, she met with Severo in early December 1849.
“If all our workers stay healthy,” she said, “we will be short twenty macheteros for the three hundred cuerdas ready to be harvested, ¿no es así?”
“Sí, señora, that’s my estimate, too.”
“Do you think we can find twenty more men before the zafra?”
“Difficult,” he said, “not