Spain burns a refugee cacique alive in eastern Cuba

Diego Velazquez de Cuellar landed in eastern Cuba in 1511 with a few hundred men to take the island for Spain. The resistance he met was led by Hatuey, a cacique who had crossed from Hispaniola with several hundred followers rather than live under the encomienda. Hatuey had watched what the Spanish did on his own island and warned the Cubans what was coming. He fought a guerrilla campaign in the eastern hills for some months, was captured, and was burned at the stake. The execution was meant to finish the war, and in the short run it did, since Cuba was under Spanish control within three years. Hatuey became something else. Cuban writers made him the first man to fight an invasion on Cuban soil, and he now stands in bronze and appears on the label of a beer. The mechanism is worth keeping. News about the Spanish moved between islands ahead of their ships, carried by the people escaping them.

In 1510 the Spanish crown authorised the shipment of enslaved Africans to Hispaniola and the first of them came ashore. The reason was arithmetic. Colonists had been extracting gold and food from the island using Taino labour under the encomienda system, and the Taino were dying, from overwork, from hunger when their fields went untended, and from smallpox and other diseases against which they had no immunity. The colony's output depended on bodies it no longer had. Africa offered a supply that could be bought and shipped, and Portugal already held the trading posts and the vessels. That decision stood for nearly three hundred years. It moved more than ten million people alive across the Atlantic, and it built the sugar economy that made the western third of this island the most valuable colony in the world. It also assembled, on the same ground, the population that abolished slavery there by force in 1793 and founded Haiti in 1804.

A letter of 1512 describes how Dom Afonso, king of the Kongo, won one of the civil wars of his reign after calling on Saint James. The men who escaped said afterward that at the moment of the invocation they saw a white cross above a crowd of armed horsemen, and that the sight left them unable to do anything except run. Afonso turned the victory into an institution. He merged the yearly military ceremony that commemorated his seizure of power with the church feast of Saint James on 25 July, so that the parade of the king's soldiers and the celebration of the saint became a single event. In Haiti today, pilgrims reach Plaine du Nord three days before the same feast and hold ceremonies at a muddy pit for Ogou around the clock until the mass begins, at which point most of them leave for the festival of Saint Anne at Limonade.

Mocombe opens his historical chapter with Columbus claiming the island for Spain and the Spanish exploiting its gold mines with Taino labour. He puts the pre-contact Taino population at between three and four million and states that after fifty years of Spanish rule they had been destroyed by the hardship of enslavement, organised massacres and imported disease. He calls this one of the most brutal exterminations on record. The mechanism he then traces is the substitution that followed. A Spanish priest protested against the massacre of the indigenous population and demanded an end to the injustices against them, and advocated importing Africans to work the mines and plantations as a way of ending Indian slavery on the island. Mocombe treats the two populations as directly linked by that argument rather than as separate chapters. Where this account departs from the standard one: Mocombe adopts a pre-contact Taino population of three to four million, at the very top of a range where most current estimates for Hispaniola are far lower.