CHASING THE AMERICAN DREAM FROM A SMUGGLER’S BOAT
I couldn’t bear to think about it; and yet, somehow, I couldn’t think about nothing else.
—Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
THE PERVERSE IRONY with increasing numbers of Cuban boxers, ballplayers, and ordinary citizens being trafficked off the island was that the same waters had transported their ancestors on slave ships to Cuba almost five centuries before, starting around 1520. Slavery continued to flourish in Cuba for the next 366 years, until it was outlawed in 1886.
The transatlantic slave trade tore between ten and fifteen million Africans from their homes and grimly deposited them into indentured servitude in the New World. More than two million more, shackled together in cramped, disease-ridden spaces, died making the horrific seven-week passage. Recent estimates suggest as many as one in ten voyages underwent a slave mutiny. Africans attempted suicide, tried to jump ship, or refused to eat. Slavers were known to remove the teeth of slaves so they could force-feed them. Even before any slaves entered and perished on the boats, perhaps twice as many died being marched hundreds of miles to the awaiting ships or while being held in confinement in dungeon-like conditions. In all, for every hundred slaves that reached the New World, forty perished somewhere along that excruciating journey.
Havana’s port used to be home to one of the biggest slave markets on earth. The port was protected by El Morro, which was built by the Spanish in 1589 as a fortress to guard Havana against invasion and raids. A chain was spread out across the waters. In 1762, the British captured El Morro after they landed in Cojimar, attacked from land, and mined through a bastion to seize control. The following year England returned Cuba to Spanish control and La Cabana was built as insurance against further invaders. The lighthouse was added in the mid-nineteenth century.
Importation of slaves was outlawed in the United States at the beginning of the nineteenth century and Spain officially did the same twelve years later in 1820, the same year the American government ruled that bringing African slaves to the United States was an act of piracy, a capital offense. However, the trade hardly slowed down. Seven years after the American ban, twice the amount of slaves arrived in Havana. The number of slaves doubled again the following year. Slaves would continue to arrive on Cuban shores, unabated, for the next fifty-six years. By the turn of the eighteenth century, nearly one in four people living in Cuba was a slave. Hundreds of thousands more slaves continued to arrive by the boatload. In 1886, Cuba’s population had exploded to nearly a million and a half people. The global demand for sugar and tobacco, and the extraordinary labor force required to produce both, contributed to the ever-growing slave class. By that time three U.S. presidents had offered to buy Cuba from the Spanish, offering a lot more money for the island than they’d offered France in 1803 for Louisiana ($15 million) or the Russians in 1867 for Alaska ($7.2 million). In 1897, President McKinley offered Spain $300 million. No dice.
The following year, in 1898, when war broke out between the United States and Spain after the U.S.S. Maine sunk in Havana’s harbor, the United States finally had their island. On December 10, 1898, following four months of fighting, Spain and the United States signed the Treaty of Paris. After Spain relinquished control of the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico to the United States, Cuba took down the Spanish flag and raised the stars and stripes.
“What’s a million dollars compared to the love of eight million Cubans?” Teófilo Stevenson famously replied to an offer of millions of dollars to leave his island. But since Castro took power in 1959, over a million Cubans had left. Castro called anyone who wanted to leave a “worm” or a “traitor,” and most of the Cubans who had escaped looked at anyone who agreed with Stevenson’s position as being brainwashed or scared for their lives to voice any dissenting opinion to the party line. What most compounded the ambiguity of this dynamic for me was watching the boxers who defected—mostly black Cubans (although, unlike African Americans, I’ve never met a Cuban who didn’t refer to himself solely as a Cuban)—proudly wearing the Cuban flag on their trunks and on their robes in the United States. I could never determine exactly which Cuba they believed they were fighting for. It was never clear if they were fighting for the Cuba before Fidel or the one they hoped would come after. And what Cuba was that supposed to be?