Cuba - Lonely Planet [11]
Despite Velázquez’ attempts to protect the local Indians from the gross excesses of the Spanish swordsmen, things quickly got out of hand and the invaders soon found that they had a full-scale rebellion on their hands. Leader of the embittered and short-lived insurgency was the feisty Hatuey, an influential Taíno cacique and archetype of the Cuban resistance, who was eventually captured and burned at the stake, inquisition-style, for daring to challenge the iron fist of Spanish rule.
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For the most comprehensive all-round news about Cuba today, click on the Havana Journal (www.havanajournal.com, in five different languages).
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With the resistance decapitated, the Spaniards set about emptying Cuba of its relatively meager gold and mineral reserves using the beleaguered natives as forced labor. As slavery was nominally banned under a papal edict, the Spanish got around the various legal loopholes by introducing a ruthless encomienda system, whereby thousands of natives were rounded up and forced to work for Spanish landowners on the pretext that they were receiving free ‘lessons’ in Christianity. The brutal system lasted 20 years before the ‘Apostle of the Indians,’ Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, appealed to the Spanish Crown for more humane treatment, and in 1542 the encomiendas were abolished. Catastrophically, for the unfortunate Taínos, the call came too late. Those who had not already been worked to death in the gold mines quickly succumbed to fatal European diseases such as smallpox and by 1550 only about 5000 scattered survivors remained.
A Taste for Sugar
In 1522, with the local natives perishing fast, the first slaves arrived in Cuba from Africa via Hispaniola. The Spanish colonizers were marginally less repressive in the treatment of their African brethren than the plantation owners further north, a situation that allowed Afro-Cubans greater freedom of expression and more scope to be creative. Cuba’s slaves were kept together in tribal groups, enabling them to retain certain elements of their indigenous culture and, in contrast to their counterparts in Haiti or the United States, they retained various legal rights: to own property, get married and even buy their own freedom.
Put to work on cattle ranches, tobacco plantations and the fledgling sugar mills that had already started to spring up around the countryside, the slaves were integral to the gradual growth of the Cuban economy over the ensuing 100 years from subsistence colony to grand commercial enterprise. But there were troubles ahead.
From the mid-16th century to the mid-18th century, Cuba became the nexus point for a vicious power struggle between wealthy Spanish traders on the one hand and pirates flying the Jolly Roger on the other. The bountiful booty of New World gold and silver shored up in Cuban harbors was too hard for the corsairs to resist. Santiago de Cuba was plundered in 1554 and Havana was attacked a year later, leading the embattled Spaniards to construct an impressive line of fortifications around the island’s most vulnerable harbors. It made little difference. By the 1660s a new generation of marauding pirates led by the wily Welsh governor of Jamaica, Henry Morgan, revealed further holes in Spain’s weak naval defenses and, with Spanish power in Europe constantly under threat, the healthy economic future of the Cuban colony looked to be seriously in doubt.
In 1762 Spain joined in the Seven