Havana, Cuba, around 1715

Why was Havana so important to Spain?

For about two hundred years Havana was where Spain’s homeward treasure ships met. The flota came from Veracruz in Mexico, and the galeones came from Cartagena and Portobelo. At Havana they took on food and water, made repairs, and then sailed together through the Florida Straits and the Bahama Channel towards Spain. In 1634 the Crown called the city the “Key to the New World and Bulwark of the West Indies”.

By 1715 a long war had upset the timetable, and fleets sailed less often and less regularly, though convoys still passed through Havana until the 1730s. By the mid-1700s Havana was the third-largest city in Spanish America, home to tens of thousands of people.

What happened to the 1715 treasure fleet?

In 1715 a fleet of about eleven or twelve ships under Juan Esteban de Ubilla, including a French ship, the Grifon, sailed from Havana late, on 27 July (some accounts say 24 July), right in hurricane season. Four days later, on 31 July, a hurricane drove the fleet onto the coast of Florida. About 1,000 of the roughly 2,500 people aboard died, and only the Grifon got away.

Salvors sent from Havana recovered much of the silver. English raiders under Henry Jennings attacked their camp in 1715–1716, a raid linked to the pirate years in Nassau. Another Havana fleet was wrecked off Florida in 1733.

How was Havana defended?

Havana was Spain’s best-defended port. Its harbour is reached through a narrow channel, with forts on both sides:

• La Real Fuerza, begun in 1558, is one of the oldest stone forts in the Americas. It also held the fleets’ treasure.
• The Morro was ordered by King Philip II in 1589, designed by the Italian engineer Battista Antonelli and built in stages from about 1590 to about 1630–1640, on the rocky point east of the harbour mouth.
• La Punta stands across the channel. Work began in 1590; a hurricane damaged it in 1595, and it was rebuilt smaller.
• The chain: a heavy chain, called a boom, could be stretched between La Punta and the Morro to keep ships out. It is reported from about 1630 and appears on 18th-century harbour plans.
• The city walls were begun in the 1670s and finished about 1740. Sources differ on the exact dates.

The huge fortress of La Cabaña came later, after the British captured Havana in 1762.

What was the 1717 tobacco monopoly?

Tobacco was Havana’s great crop. By 1712 there were about 300 tobacco mills in and around the city. The growers, called vegueros, were mostly free small farmers, many of them from the Canary Islands, and many served in the local militia.

On 27 July 1717 Governor Vicente Raxa (also spelled Raja) proclaimed a royal monopoly, called the estanco. From then on, growers could sell their tobacco only to the Crown, at prices the Crown fixed. The monopoly lasted, in changing forms, for about a century.

Why did the tobacco growers revolt?

The growers fought back three times.

• August 1717: about 400 to 500 armed growers gathered at Jesús del Monte and marched into Havana almost unopposed. The historian José Naranjo records their cry: “Long live Philip V and down with bad government!” Governor Raxa fled aboard a ship on 24 August. A new governor pardoned the rebels in 1718, but the Crown restored the tobacco office that December.
• June 1720: growers burned crops at Guanabacoa and Santiago de las Vegas and cut off Havana’s water and food. They won a pardon and the right to sell their extra tobacco.
• February 1723: about 800 to 900 armed growers destroyed tobacco fields. Troops attacked them at Santiago on 20 February, and one grower was killed. Three days later eleven prisoners were executed without a trial, and their bodies were left beside the roads until the bishop had them buried. More than fifty others were never seen again.

The king rebuked Governor Guazo, fined him to help the families of those killed, and loosened the rules on buying tobacco. The growers had always said they were loyal to the king and angry only with his officials.

Who lived and worked in Havana?

Havana was home to soldiers, sailors, merchants and farmers, free and enslaved. Free men of colour, known as pardos and morenos, had served in Havana’s militias since the 1600s. They also sailed on privateers and joined attacks launched from the city. One of them, Antonio Flores, enlisted in 1708 and rose to command a battalion.

Enslaved Africans were part of Havana too, though in smaller numbers than after the 1760s, when the big sugar plantations grew. Under the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, Britain’s South Sea Company held the asiento, the contract to sell enslaved Africans in Spain’s colonies, and it kept an agent in Havana. A surviving shipping paper from 1738 lists 100 men, women, boys and girls sent from Kingston, Jamaica, to that agent, Anthony Welden; each had been branded with the letter A. Around 1715 a merchant named Ricardo O’Farrill opened Havana’s first house for selling enslaved people.

From the 1720s Havana also built warships. A Havana-born master builder, Juan de Acosta, led the work, using prized Cuban timber, and in 1735 the royal shipyard moved to a larger site.

Did pirates use Havana?

No. Havana was a base against pirates and English smugglers, not a haven for them. Spanish law treated any foreigner who traded with its colonies as a smuggler, and after 1713 guardacostas, coast-guard ships run by licensed private captains, seized English vessels. Their numbers grew after 1720. Smuggling went on anyway: by the middle of the century nearly half of Cuba’s goods left the island illegally, much of it to British traders.

Pirates did prey on ships sailing to and from Havana. A 1724 book says Benjamin Hornigold and the young Blackbeard captured a vessel out of Havana carrying 120 barrels of flour. Forces from Havana struck back, attacking the Bahamas in 1703 and 1720, Charleston in 1706 and Pensacola in 1719. In February 1720 a squadron under Francisco Cornejo attacked Nassau; Woodes Rogers’s defenders and storms drove it off, though the raiders carried away more than a hundred enslaved people from outlying farms.