In 1524,1 an ancestor of my father2 named Bernardo Marín3 received a land grant4 from Hernán Cortés.5 He expanded these holdings until in the seventh generation6 the family controlled7 an extent of tobacco8 fields unexcelled in the New World.9 My son, with no grasp of history,10 no sense of proportion about the broad effects of tobacco,11 and a Romanticist’s infatuation with the Indian,12 repudiated his heritage in an act of suicide. When Communism fails in Cuba, as it must, and Castro13 flees, our family will again take up its place on the island.14 We will once again make the finest cigars in the world. And I will resist feelings of bitterness toward a middle son15 who could not wait. His grandfather told him as I did: patience. In this neglected virtue16 is the story of America.
1. As a historian I have an obligation in my short paper to the exigencies and dictates of my profession, as well as a duty of courtesy toward the reader. I must, therefore, make clear at the outset that even though I am dealing for the most part with primary materials in the archives of my own family, I have after many years of meticulous research and also careful comparison with contemporaneous histories developed the confidence to let my family stand, like Everyman, for all families. (And I now provide access to these documents, formally, to my fellow historians.) I must state, too, that in my paper, which deals with incidents familiar even in their detail to amateur historians, I have deliberately chosen to consult not just lesser-known works, or works not as yet translated into the major research languages, but works that are at odds with contemporary historical thought. In doing so, I realize I open myself to criticism and invite contempt for the foundation of my ideas. But how else a fresh wind?
2. Julio Cartena Mejordigas. My family dropped in 1912 the Spanish practice of a doubled surname, commemorating the lineages of both parents. Wilford F. Grace, in the closing years of a brilliant career at the University of Witwatersrand, devoted himself to the study of my father’s correspondence with relatives in Asturias. My father, a manic-depressive personality, wrote obsessively to even remote relatives in a kind of pathetic (though to me quite noble) attempt to clarify his place in history. It was he, for all his good points, who first gave my middle son, Petrero, whose life I take up at the end of my essay, doubts about his lineage. See “Julio Cartena Mejordigas: The Early Correspondence (1936–43)” by W. F. Grace in South African Review of Colonial History 18, no. 4 (1967): 54–78; and The Asturian Temperament by Nolan I. Benito.
3. In addition to material in the family archives at the University of Texas at Austin, the reader is directed to the Marín Collection at the municipal library in Santander and to the Cormuello Collection of Cuban Historical Documents at the University of Oviedo. Marín was a sailmaker and an innovator of stitching techniques as well as the developer of a resinous treatment for sail thread that made early sixteenth-century Spanish sails, with their greater flexibility in cold weather and resistance to rot, the envy of European mariners. See The Advent of European Power by Hu-Li Huang; Galician Sailcraft by George G. Borcello; and “ ‘El Hilo Maravilloso’: A Key to Early Sixteenth-Century Spanish Sea Power” by M.D.R. Meltwater in Atlantic Maritime History 108, no. 5 (1974): 435–88.
Marín sailed with Cortés and is mentioned in the standard biographies in his capacity as sailmaker-to-the-fleet; but references are few to his agrarian predilections and to his more or less sudden shift of occupation, which occurred when he was granted 17.6 hectares of arable land and the services of 30 indigenous workers in Cuba. I have been in correspondence with Roberta Nesserman-Phillips of the Department of History at Florida International University, who is preparing a book-length manuscript of Marín’s early years in Cuba, including his role in the suppression of the Mortemos Revolt. Early drafts of her manuscript make it plain that the renowned sailmaker and the lesser-known agrarian pioneer are one and the same, a point contested some years ago by Makelos Kostermela in a seminal article, “Technical Achievement in Sixteenth-Century French, English, and Spanish Sailcraft,” in Journal of Sewn and Fastened Materials 16, no. 7 (1947): 136–59. See also “Early Agrarian Reform Movements in the Caribbean” by Victor Brent in Panamanian Perspectives 44, no. 2 (1985): 227–89; and L’Insurrection des indigènes de l’île de Cuba et la répression espagnole by Jean-Bédel Bosschère, pp. 508–15.
4. The property, a grant from Carlos V made upon the recommendation of Cortés, was one of sixteen Cortés authorized in 1524, each of equal size, the so-called “peach,” or “durazno,” of 17.6 hectares (43.5 acres). The grant was located in the southern piedmont of the Organos Mountains in the Pinar del Río, at the heart of what was to become the Vuelta Abajo. At this time the land was not so highly valued that Marín could not purchase tracts cheaply and trade to his advantage, perhaps with a sense of intuition. At the time of his death in 1551, he held title to 251 hectares (620.2 acres).
The land-grant system of patronage in early Cuban history was, of course, politically motivated, and the process was subject to a certain amount of corruption. One must be careful, however, not to assume unblessed intentions prevailed or that invidious plots existed where none has been proven. Among the most lucid and penetrating analyses of this volatile aspect of Spanish colonial history is “Terrenos en barbecho, trabajadores disponibles: Una visión de agricultura duradera,” a 1988 doctoral dissertation by Manuel Peña, which draws heavily on two obscure works: La punizione di Cuba by Luigi Pernotti and Servitus in Novo Mundo by Henri Latrousse, S.J.
5. Cortés, of course, has been studied handily by Demott, Esperanza, Bouchald, Clackas, Merriman, and Dorger. All of these biographies are rich and each one is distinctly valuable. Among more recent work, both the Tesraffe and Urbanowitz biographies suffer in my mind from vindictiveness and offer no improvement on earlier scholarship. Quite the contrary is true of Cortés and the Institution of an Imperial Order by Esther Manas vanKamp. She not only brings to bear her extensive knowledge of the Tomás de Bivar collection, which has only recently been opened to scholars, but pioneers a psychoanalytic approach long missing in studies of Cortés. In addition to her singular modern work, see her “Iconography in the Mexican Journals of Cortés” in Journal of Historical Psychoanalysis 52, no. 3 (1989): 279–301.
6. In tracing the lineage of fifty-one New World families of Spanish origin whose founders arrived in the Caribbean in the sixteenth century, I’ve found that with thirty-six the consolidation of great wealth came in the seventh generation. (By great wealth I mean a perennial wealth, an aggregation of investment, credit, and land that cannot be depleted at that point by scandal, squandering of opportunity, ordinary prodigality, or even criminal activity.) I am no mathematician; but, noting that this wealth does inexplicably begin to dissipate in the eighth generation and that by the ninth or tenth generation, it is on a par with that, respectively, of the fifth and fourth generations, a formula is present here seemingly worth divining.
7. A relative term, which benefits from the clarification offered in Carlson Kildfray’s Subterranean Economics. Kildfray has, of course, been heavily criticized for his putative insensitivity to human plight; but I believe he comes closer in his work to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century economic reality in the Spanish Caribbean than any other economic historian. The fact is that Taino, Ciboney, Cuna, Island Carib, Mosquito, and other indigenes were at a primary level of social and economic organization, but this was not their fault. It was necessary that they be brought along quickly with the development of New World wealth; and it was inevitable in such a process that some individuals would be treated roughly. In El florecimiento de la economía política occidental by Juan Ramón Aruba and Kasumasa Asahi’s Dotchakuteki keizai chitsujo no jokyo (The elimination of indigenous economic boundaries), such provocative concepts as “ordained wealth,” “penetration economics,” and “disparity compassion” are subjected to stunning exegeses.
The storm-tossed subject of the exercise of economic and political control in previously occupied New World territories having been addressed, the further question of authority in these new lands vis-à-vis the desires of competing colonial family groups arises; and here, certainly, we have some dark chapters before us. For a discussion of criminal subterfuge among the ruling classes in the Spanish Caribbean, see Politika potrebleniia i politicheskii konflikt v Kube xvii veka (Consummation policies and political conflict in seventeenth-century Cuba) by Maldano Pestrovich. For a frank discussion of extortion and murder among the same, see “The Tenebrous Light of Grief: The Economy of Santo Domingo and Cuba in the Sixteenth Century” by Beverly Weissbaum in International Journal of Colonial Theory 62, no. 2 (1986): 1245–91.
Alternative views of indigenous land rights, and the legal and moral implications arising therefrom, are ably set out in Malcolm Batson’s A Woeful Tide and Créatures de la lune by Rebecca Tide Assiminy.
8. Although a strong home market for tobacco developed almost immediately after colonization by the Spanish, the cultivation of tobacco in Cuba did not begin until 1580, according to Demster Poltcaza in his authoritative Tobacco: Its Origin and Production. Bernardo Marín, however, in a letter to his father dated 15 May 1545 (BMLS 3.4506), states that he seeded his first crop of Nicotiana tabacum in the spring of that year. As nearly as I can determine, he was the first to export Cuban tobacco, probably by 1548.
In another letter to his father, dated 22 August 1548 (BMLS 3.4811), Marín sets forth the reasons for planting this crop and speculates about his success. He makes reference to several precipitating dreams and, of course, to the vagaries of Spanish colonial shipping. The most astonishing line in this letter is his contention that “the proceeds [from the tobacco crop] will ensure the wealth of my descendants in these wretched and primitive lands to the seventh generation.”
The contributions of his descendants to the development of tobacco varieties are substantial (cf. Tobacco Leaf: Its Culture and Cure by T. E. Roberson, pp. 257–61); and the fame of the family’s cigar leaf, unsurpassed for aroma, was widespread by the end of the seventeenth century. Oddly, Marín himself did not smoke. As well as I can determine, García Mendoza, in the fourth generation (b. 1643), was the first member of the family to smoke. Tobacco cultivation was first and foremost a business, in the establishment and development of which Bernardo Marín and his descendants were very aggressive.
9. A statement hard to defend, certainly, but so crucial to my theme that I have felt justified in the extraordinarily timeconsuming work needed to justify it. With the help of several assistants, whose labors I hereby gratefully acknowledge, I reviewed the holdings of all the tobacco-growing families in the Caribbean and in the North American colonies in 1735, when the firstborn son in the seventh generation married. The patriarch of the family in that year, Diego Marín Tréllez, owned 2,114 hectares (5,223.7 acres); his two brothers controlled between them another 728 hectares (1,798.9 acres). The total, 2,842 hectares (7,022.6 acres) devoted exclusively to the cultivation of tobacco, exceeds by 188 hectares (464.5 acres) the holdings of the Carlos family of Santo Domingo, the next highest total. For reference, the largest holdings in the North American colonies in 1735, those of the Benson family in Virginia, totaled only 403 hectares (995.8 acres).
10. Although well educated at Hotchkiss and Yale, and holding graduate degrees in economics from Stanford and in political science from the University of Texas at Austin, my son disparaged history as a discipline (possibly a reaction to his father’s profession, therefore not a true denial). In the closing years of his life, he spoke incessantly of “revisionist histories,” by which he meant any history, no matter how pathetic or meager its scholarship, that condescended to ideas of progress or that was critical of the civilizing influence of the colonizing nations in the New World. He took a perverse pleasure, I believe, in actually funding some of the more irresponsible and insipid of these publications, which do not merit cataloging here. His grasp of history, the general flow of events, I believe was exceptional; but his failure to perceive the concatenation that gives history its intellectual tension and its meaning, his blindness to the filaments of cause, were almost complete by the last year of his life. The despair that reliably follows on the abandonment of any original wisdom no doubt contributed to his wayward behavior and the sense of futility that overcame his sense of hope.
I would hasten to add in his defense that he was no supporter of Castro.
11. No gift of the New World, with the possible exception of gold, brought with it a more salubrious effect than tobacco. In the contemporary political climate, where health issues are confounded by a politics of righteousness and intimidation, it is helpful to recall that for hundreds of years the cultivation of tobacco, the manufacture of tobacco products, and tobacco’s sale and distribution were a source of the deepest kind of agrarian pleasure, of fundamental dignity in the workplace, and of material wealth for hundreds of thousands of people. Conflicting scientific evidence indicates that nicotine, tarry compounds, and carbon monoxide from cigar and cigarette smoking may affect some individuals adversely, but a far greater number of tobacco users very likely suffer no ill effects. Indeed, were it not for the contentious political climate surrounding the cultivation and marketing of this plant, the pleasures it offers might be extolled as are the pleasures of wine, the varieties of cheese, or the benefits of any other of nature’s products not (yet) subject to vehement attack—in which, one might justifiably add, an opposition to capitalism is transparently clear.
12. The literature here, of course, is voluminous. For my purposes I have been interested principally in publications of historians and other scholars on the “second war,” the second round of negotiations with indigenes in the New World, largely diplomatic, to settle “land claims” and allied issues of political geography. Again, while the literature in defense of these claims, from both the scholarly and legal quarters, is in its ascendency, the countervailing thought of those who see the grave dangers posed to stable economies by the pursuit of such claims is in dire need of review. The Distant Shore by Muriel Cagney, Estone Bazzergahnah’s The Triple Alliance: Environment, Indians, and Pacifists, and Les faux dieux: Échec de l’ecuménisme by Etienne Crochet are early, praiseworthy attempts to separate nihil ad rem anthropological thinking from what is, at base, really only an economic debate.
The profusion of popular pro-indigene writing need not concern us here; scholarly writing in this vein is still largely self-defeating because of its polemical tone and tendentious structure. Nevertheless, several recent works, one must say assiduously researched and presented in an evenhanded way, deserve careful reading: among them are Killing the Horses, Scattering the Sheep by Adrian Nightwalker; Iktome Reality by Thomas Yellow Calf; and Harrison Wood’s Bears Fall from the Sky. All, of course, are inimical to Western civilization.
13. The surprising durability and resilience of the Castro regime are the subject of three new works: Los consejos militares de la Sierra Occidental by José Mellín; Die Entstehung eines PolizeiStaats in Castros Kuba by Ladislaw Krupp; and The Betrayal of Cuban Dreams by Aktannis Moulifiz. A new dual biography of Ernesto Guevara and Juan Perón, Guevara and Perón by Percy St. Evrain, takes advantage of recently discovered papers in the archives of the University of Buenos Aires to clarify Guevara’s role in the twenty-sixth of July movement. In his closing chapter, St. Evrain offers an original analysis of Castro’s demagoguery.
14. At the Institute of Land Registry in Miami, work on recording and verifying the holdings of displaced Cuban families is now virtually complete. When these families are permitted to return to Cuba, they will take up the daunting but ultimately gratifying task of restoring the Cuban economy. The shattering experience of being driven from lands productively and continuously occupied, in some cases for more than four hundred years, will be over. The Indian psychologist and political scientist Nadali Misra, almost in anticipation of these events, has written a most pertinent essay, “The Healing Effect of Reclamation in Birth-Right Land Disputes” in Journal of Oceanian Psychology 24, no. 6 (1991): 402–28.
15. Relevant issues of primogeniture are taken up in Furman Bodfield’s The Fate of the Second Son, pp. 206–35, 288–89, 310–12, and 416–24. The related issue of parental disappointment in offspring is addressed in Simon Bednar’s Suspended Gratification.
I am preparing my son’s journals for publication, partly in the hope that a pattern of development in his revisionist thinking will emerge and that it will be seen to comprise part of a larger intellectual problem in his generation: a general denial of the good.
16. In the modern era, with its jaded observations and typically cynical analysis of the human effort to ensure a rewarding life, it is challenging to convene an amicable forum for the discussion of simple virtue. Yet without virtuous behavior, every society unravels (see La degradación de la esperanza by Philip Llosa). To succeed in life, to post a record of tenacity, thrift, shrewdness, and courage, such as that which distinguishes the descendants of Bernardo Marín, requires the studied application of virtue. Without it there is no wealth, no leisure, no triumph. In his brilliant critical biography of De Gaulle, Emilion Klugge-Wrasse contends that if a leader is without virtue, those whom he leads will fail to comprehend their destiny; but a virtuous leader will inspire a nation with what is right in all spheres of activity, from aesthetic to economic.
In America, the role of virtuous achievement is so deeply embedded in the culture it can even transcend poor leadership. In Casting a Cloak Before the Sun, Cándido Argüello writes that in America it is impossible to understand either business or politics without reference to the desire to lead a virtuous life. This is a daring statement, worthy of careful review.
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