Santiago de Cuba

What was Santiago de Cuba like in 1715?

The Spanish conqueror Diego Velázquez founded Santiago in 1515 (some lists say 1514), and from 1522 it was the capital of Cuba. Around 1550 the governor moved to Havana, where the treasure fleets gathered, and over the next decades Havana became the capital for good. Historians give different dates for the official change, from 1550 to 1607.

Santiago stayed the main town of the east. By the time Silver & Sails begins, Cuba was ruled from Havana, but Santiago had its own governor, who looked after the eastern end of the island; Jamaica’s officials wrote to him directly. Cattle ranches around towns such as Bayamo supplied hides, one of eastern Cuba’s oldest exports. In 1722 the town opened a seminary to train priests.

How was Santiago de Cuba defended?

Santiago’s bay is reached through a narrow, winding channel. On the high rock at its mouth stands the castle of San Pedro de la Roca, usually called the Morro. It was designed by the Italian military engineer Giovanni Battista Antonelli, and UNESCO says it has guarded the entrance since 1638. Spain built it because of growing rivalry with England in the Caribbean.

That rivalry came close after England seized Jamaica from Spain in the 1650s. In October 1662 an English force from Jamaica under Christopher Myngs, with the young Henry Morgan among its captains, took Santiago, blew up the castle with its own gunpowder and burned the cathedral.

Spain rebuilt the castle from the 1660s, adding new gun platforms and a second fort, La Estrella, and in the mid-1700s it added new bastions. The stone terraces that visitors climb today show these layers of rebuilding.

Who were the guardacostas of Santiago de Cuba?

Spain did not allow foreigners to trade with its colonies. To stop smugglers, governors gave licences to privately owned armed ships, called corsairs or guardacostas (coast guards). Their owners and crews earned their living from what they captured. Cuban ports, Santiago among them, were issuing these licences from the 1680s, and corsairs sailed from Santiago during the war of 1702 to 1713.

After the war, the seizures went on. In August 1716 Peter Heywood, then in command of Jamaica, wrote to the governors of Havana and Santiago. He complained that English ships on lawful voyages were being seized, and that seven or eight had been taken into Santiago and Trinidad, another Cuban port, and condemned as prizes. In 1720 English officials complained that, to raiders licensed in Cuba, peace and war were all one.

Santiago’s corsairs hunted near their home port, in the Windward Passage between Cuba and Hispaniola, and off Jamaica’s north coast. To the English they were pirates; to Spain they were defending its trade laws. Santiago kept this role for decades: in 1741 a British force from Jamaica landed at Guantánamo, meaning to march on the town, and failed.

Did Santiago de Cuba trade with Jamaica?

Yes, though in Spanish law it was smuggling. Jamaica lay so close that its traders slipped into quiet Cuban bays, and historians have shown that Jamaican traders carried enslaved Africans and food to Spanish colonies, Cuba among them, in exchange for Cuban goods such as hides and livestock. In 1730 a Jamaican captain told officials about a trading voyage to Cuba, where he talked with Spanish merchants about the mules Jamaica bought from them.

The same sea brought prizes. Ships the corsairs captured were sold in Cuban ports with their cargoes. One schooner taken off Jamaica by a Santiago corsair in 1747 was carrying salt cod, barrels of mackerel, tar and barrel staves. Hides from eastern Cuba’s cattle ranches had been traded, legally and illegally, since the early 1600s (see hides and deerskins).

Who were the royal slaves of El Cobre?

In the hills west of Santiago lie the copper mines of El Cobre, worked by enslaved people since at least the early 1600s. In 1670 the Crown took the mines from a contractor who had neglected them, and about 270 enslaved people became the property of the king himself. Historians call them the royal slaves of El Cobre.

In 1677, when officials planned to sell them or move them to Havana, they withdrew into the mountains. Their captain, Juan Moreno, petitioned to let them stay with their families. They won, and El Cobre became a recognised village whose men served as militia. In the 1730s another generation again fled to the hills in protest against local officials, and in 1734 petitioned the captain-general in Havana. Mining seems to have stayed small after 1670: by 1780 most men farmed, and women did much of the mining.

The village was also home to the image of the Virgin of Charity. In 1687 Moreno swore to how it had been found floating in Nipe Bay. The royal slaves were freed around 1800, and the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre became Cuba’s patron saint in 1916.

Could people escape from Jamaica to freedom in Cuba?

Some did. From the mid-1600s Spain followed a policy historians call religious sanctuary: enslaved people who fled from English, Dutch or other foreign colonies to Spanish land and asked to become Catholics could be allowed to stay and be freed. For people enslaved in Jamaica, Cuba was the nearest Spanish shore.

The promise was not always kept. A royal order of 1753 mentions the governor of Santiago dealing with three men who had escaped from Jamaica, and admits that runaways had sometimes been handed back to their owners for a price. That order, following one of 1750, declared that such people were free forever and could not be sold again.

The traffic ran both ways. In 1716 Jamaica complained that Spanish raiders had landed and carried enslaved people away from its plantations, and in later wars Cuban corsairs sold people taken in such raids.