The Sugar King of Havana (7 page)

The
batey
at Senado.

Among my family, Bernabé is known fondly as Papa Né. His local nickname, though, was
El León de Camagüey
, the Lion of Camagüey. And, like one of the stud bulls he also raised around the mill—including a rather special breed called the Santa Gertrudis, a kind of walking steak—Bernabé allegedly sired tens of illegitimate children, as well as two legitimate families of his own. His first wife, María de la Caridad, my great-great-grandmother, had six children and died when Bernabé was in his mid-forties. His second wife, Elizabeth Laurent, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of the French governess at Senado, bore him six more. Bernabé looms in my mind like one of Robert Graves’s great-bellied ogres of yore:

Whatever his virility, Bernabé was also a clear-thinking man. “One has to be lucid” is the parting instruction in a letter that he wrote over a century ago. Written in a cramped hand on thin onionskin paper that is stained with age and damp, the letter is bound with 499 others in a copy-book, through which a bookworm has since drilled a neat hole from the first page to the last. Although they were written at the end of the nineteenth century, what strikes me each time I read them is their enduring relevance. Because of the way time seems to repeat itself in Cuba, when Bernabé wrote all those years ago of the U.S. president’s “silly games” and the Cuban revolutionary government’s “foolish rules,” his words seem strangely pertinent today.

The first letter is dated September 28, 1898. Bernabé, then fifty-seven years old, has just returned to the island after spending two years in New York. It is also a significant date: one month before Lobo was born, one month after peace has been declared after three decades of fighting for independence against the Spanish, and a marker for the new Cuban Republic which is about to begin.

 

 

CUBA, “THE EVER FAITHFUL ISLE,” had been the last great bastion of Spain’s vast empire in the Americas. The patriots had fought a first bloody ten-year war against Spain that began in 1868, when the planter Carlos Manuel de Céspedes freed the 30 slaves on his small sugar estate in eastern Cuba and added them to his army of 117 men. Céspedes then torched the surrounding cane fields: “Better . . . that Cuba should be free even if one has to burn every vestige of civilization” was his rallying cry. An inconclusive truce was signed in 1878, and the patriots rebelled again the following year, but their offensive soon fizzled out. The next revolt began in 1895, organized from New York by José Martí, Cuba’s “Apostle of Independence.” Martí’s great feat was to unite a host of factions both within Cuba and its émigré communities in the revolutionary cause, and his success persuaded two celebrated leaders from the first war, Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo, to come out of retirement and take up arms against Spain again.

Martí, an extravagantly gifted poet and diplomat, was the most brilliant and contradictory of Cubans. He came of age in Havana during the Ten Years’ War, and was as passionate about independence as he was in his hatred of slavery. Aged sixteen, he founded his first newspaper,
Patria Libre
, and was later sentenced by the Spanish to six years’ hard labor after writing a letter that accused a friend of being a traitor to the independence cause. Although a central figure in Cuban history, Martí spent most of his forty-two-year life outside the island in exile. Most photographs show a short and unsmiling figure with a high forehead and big mustache, dressed in a funereal black suit and white shirt. But Martí also had a wonderful sense of humor, as the Cuban-American writer Alfredo José Estrada wisely points out. So he might see the joke in the frightfully solemn reverence that has since attached to his name—although not always, nor by all.

Bernabé, for one, disagreed with this ardent figure, who wore an iron band on his ring finger with the word
Cuba
carved on its rim. Nor was Bernabé the only planter to do so, although Bernabé was the only planter (or so I believe) that Martí called an “Enemy of the Revolution.” These are harsh words from a man whom Cuban history has since elevated to the stature of saint, or a writer whose most famous poem, “La Rosa Blanca,” “The White Rose,” enjoins the reader to turn the other cheek. Bernabé and Martí certainly had political reasons to disagree—the clash between Bernabé’s material interests and Martí’s revolution is an enduring one. Yet their differences were also marbled with personal reasons, the most important of them being the simple fact that Bernabé came from Camagüey, the hot and flat ranching province three hundred miles east of Havana.

Camagüey held a special place in Martí’s revolutionary plans, especially those of his senior military commander, Máximo Gómez. “Without Camagüey, the Revolution will be nothing,” he told Martí. This was largely due to the general’s long admiration of the province and Camagüey’s unusual place in Cuban history. Accessible during the colonial years only by boat or a hard slog along rutted roads, Camagüey’s jagged coastline meant its inhabitants placed more importance on watching out for threats of pirate attack than on obeying the letter of distant Spanish laws. Its grasslands and wild forests were also better suited to banditry and ranching than to sugar. To the west, closer to Havana, planters were wont to sit on thrones, built by slaves, surrounded by the Spanish flag and coat of arms, their feet and hands kissed by old Negroes when they asked their owners for a blessing. Camagüey, by contrast, lived free of the slave-owning tradition that haunted much of the rest of the island. Its landed families formed huge clans that intermarried with each other, and were sometimes described as the “Wasps” of Cuba: White, Aristocratic, Spanish, in their tastes rather than allegiances, and Proud. All this gave the province a “special, freedom loving mentality,” as the great Cuban historian Manuel Moreno Fraginals described it. It also explains why Camagüey’s creole cattle barons fought so bravely and willingly in the first rebellion against the Spanish. Agramonte, still a venerated revolutionary figure as the
Granma
news story I had read in my hotel bedroom showed, came from Camagüey. So did his right-hand man, Colonel Enrique Loret de Mola, Bernabé’s brother-in-law and my other Cuban great-great-grandfather. One of their most daring feats of arms occupies a place in Cuban revolutionary mythology similar to Lord Cardigan’s charge of the Light Brigade at the Crimea in English history—although Agramonte’s attack with the colonel at the head of Camagüey’s famed cavalry corps against a larger Spanish column in 1871 met with success and only one death. “Trumpeter sound the charge!” Agramonte had ordered. Outnumbered almost four to one, the Cuban troops routed the Spanish, rescued a captured general with a slight wound to his right hand, and reports said the rebel cavalry’s movements were so synchronized that they appeared to act “as if just one body.” Gómez, who was Dominican, had fought alongside such men during his first battles against the Spanish, and remembered them proudly. “Without Camagüey’s support I will feel like a warrior, but not a true revolutionary,” he told Martí.

Martí had a more anguished relationship with Camagüey. Although he never visited the province, not once in his life, it often occupied his thoughts. In the twenty-eight volumes of his collected works, Martí mentions it 110 times; Puerto Príncipe, as its capital was then known, another 31; and people from the region on innumerable occasions. His wife, Carmen Zayas-Bazán, the daughter of a rich landowner, came from Puerto Príncipe. But Martí was a generous womanizer, theirs was an unsuccessful marriage, and when it finally fell apart in 1881, Carmen left her husband in New York and returned to her family home in Camagüey. She took with her their only child, José Francisco, whom Martí never saw again.

From that moment on, Camagüey became for exiled Martí a place forever linked not only with his lost country but also with his lost son. In Manhattan, Martí’s brilliant and restless mind continued to feed Cuba’s independence movement. He raised funds. He organized. He wrote, prolifically. It was through Martí, also the New York consul for Argentina and Paraguay, that South America learned about North America—not just the bustle of Yankee life, which Martí admired, but its cult of wealth too, which he detested. “I have lived inside the monster, and know its entrails” is his famous quote, taken from a letter written the day before he died. Yet, as Martí admitted to a friend in New York, “My mind is not here with me, but in Puerto Príncipe, where Carmen is and my son—the distance almost forces me to go to Cuba.”

Martí shaped this loss into his first published book of poetry,
Ismaelillo.
Its tender poems are filled with feverish longing, and have titles like “My Kinglet
,
” “Son of My Soul,” and “Fragrant Arms”:

But Martí also wrote in his diaries, “I love my duty more than my son.” He remained in New York, plotting revolution from the junta’s dingy office near Wall Street.

Martí is central to Cuban history, especially Castro’s vision of it, which goes something like this: For four centuries the country was a colony of Spain, with the last thirty years spent fighting for independence. For sixty years after, Cuba was a neo-colony of the United States. It was only in 1959, with the triumph-of-the-Revolution, that Cuba achieved true independence, or “dignity,” as Castro has called it. The rhetorical vanishing point of this “one-hundred-year struggle” is that it elevates Castro’s revolution by making it the logical culmination of a fight for freedom that is embodied in the haloed but eventually thwarted figure of Martí. “The Revolution begins now,” Castro had proclaimed to a jubilant crowd in Santiago in January 1959. “This time, luckily for Cuba, the revolution will truly come into being.” That is why “patriot” leaders have ever since been elevated to the heroic status of Agramontes, while anyone with an opposing point of view has been condemned and vilified. “Within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing,” Castro was fond of saying. Yet little was predestined about Cuba in the 1890s, or in 1958 on the eve of Fidel Castro’s revolution, or even now. Nothing is immutable, except perhaps geography. Time can reduce even history’s most ardent revolutionary ideas to ashes.

Indeed by 1893, fifteen years after the Ten Years’ War ended and a decade after Bernabé set up his first mill, the heroic Camagüey that Gómez remembered had changed. Age had softened the revolutionary resolve of the province’s old war heroes. Gómez himself was in his sixties, Agramonte had died, and his adjutant colonel, Loret de Mola, had sworn never to raise arms again, as he could not bear for his wife and children to suffer another war. The devastation of the fighting that followed Céspedes’s exhortation to ruin in the first war of independence had left many of Camagüey’s once-proud families homeless, penniless, and with only their names—often on the headstones of graves. Now in his fifties, the colonel was more interested in prosperity and reconciliation than revolution, sentiments captured by what was then called the Autonomist movement. Although now often forgotten, the Autonomists remain of current interest as they represented a stream of political thought, honorable rather than heroic, that held out the possibility of a different Cuba, a country-that-might-have-been, rather than the blood-drenched cradle of revolution it became.

“Headed by Cubans of great bravery,” as Martí described them, the Autonomists did not seek independence from Spain or annexation by the United States. They looked around South America and saw that independence had not brought the continent what it promised: Colombia was locked in civil war, so too Venezuela, while Mexico was a dictatorship. Instead, they imagined Cuba as part of a Spanish commonwealth, took Canada or Australia as their models, and were, in general, middle-class reformists who wanted the same rights in Cuba as the Spaniards already had, but no more. They hewed to a middle path of self-rule. They were Cuba’s “Third Way,” and were particularly strong in Camagüey—Rafael Montoro, their most eloquent proponent, was Camagüey’s representative to the Spanish court.

Bernabé and the Colonel supported the Autonomist project. In May 1893 they formed part of a group of Camagüeyano notables that wrote to Martí in New York, condemning the idea of a new war of independence. Their unsigned letter began by expressing the usual courtesies and then politely explained that a successful rebellion required that all Cubans have a revolutionary spirit “beating in their hearts” and “only a few felt that.” Bernabé’s opposition subsequently went even further when he actively foiled a revolutionary plot the following spring. It was led by Enrique Loynaz del Castillo, a twenty-two-year-old patriot rebel from Camagüey who idolized Martí. In New York, Loynaz had recently given Martí a photograph of his son, José Francisco, taken on on a rocky Camagüey hilltop beside a rough tree branch hung with a Cuban flag. The picture showed Martí’s son flanked by Loynaz’s friends, standing “in a rough line, like a squadron of rebels.” Martí kept the photograph on his cluttered writing desk.

In March 1894, Loynaz sailed from New York with a smuggled cargo of two hundred Remington rifles and 48,000 bullets hidden under the seats of six trams in the ship’s hold. After landing at Nuevitas, he disembarked the gun-laden trams at the wharf. Proudly sporting a silver-plated revolver he had bought a month before at Tiffany’s, Loynaz then liaised with Emilio Luaces, a Ten Years’ War veteran who worked with Bernabé. In New York, Martí had urged caution on his brave if impetuous protégé. But in Cuba, Loynaz was flush with the early success of his mission. Feeling his blood rising, he told Luaces about the smuggled cache of arms, adding that he wanted to start a revolution “right there and then.” Luaces panicked at the thought that the revolutionary junta in New York was planning to start war in Camagüey and told Bernabé of Loynaz’s plans. Uncertain as to what to do, they handed over the munitions to the Spanish, having passed word to Loynaz, who fled at dawn in a small boat. “No well-established person in Camagüey wants to back any revolutionary plans,” Bernabé later said.