Rum Historian by Marco Pierini
HISTORY OF CUBAN RUM
3. THE KEY TO THE INDIES
In the third article on the History of Cuban rum, I’m going to dedicate ample space to Big History, the History of Cuba and more, and not only to rum. I apologise to my readers, but I assure you that, as is often the case, the fortunes of our favourite distillate are closely intertwined with History in general; without knowing something about the latter, it is impossible to truly understand the former. Moreover, for our new readers I have to repeat that aguardiente de caña (sugarcane burning water), is what in Cuba they called the spirit made from sugarcane, our Rum.
Often, in our daily life and also in our reflections, we tend to take our present for granted, as if the world around us was the outcome of a natural, inevitable historical process. For example, and here we come to our subject, the fact that the Americas, Australia and other remote parts of the world now speak languages born in Middle Age Western Europe seems normal to us. And yet we must remember that until the end of the 1300s, Europe could be considered with good reason just “A Small Promontory of Asia” as Felipe Fernández Armesto writes in his seminal “Millennium. A History of the Last Thousand Years”, 1995. A lesser civilization, in a world dominated by other powers.
Actually, our modern world has been shaped to a large degree by the rush to conquer the oceans, which Western Europe started in the 1400s. A race that gave rise to the first, real globalization and later made a few, small European countries the ruling powers of the planet. Often, we tend to forget that in that race, England started last. England (or Great Britain, after the Act of Union of 1707) got to “rule the waves” after Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands and also France. Only at the end of the 1500s, roughly an entire century after the arrival of the Portuguese in India and of the Spanish in America, did the English begin to deal with America seriously. First, English privateers like Francis Drake and pirates attacked and plundered the treasures of Spanish America, but without trying to settle there. Then, in the 1620s, some semi-independent enterprises settled in some little, marginal islands like Barbados and Saint Kitts. In the 1650s, Oliver Crowell conceived his ambitious “Western Design” and sent a fleet to attack and conquer Hispaniola (present-day Santo Domingo and Haiti). The invasion of Hispaniola was ill prepared and worse carried out and after a crushing ground defeat, the English troops retired in disarray and had to re-embark quickly and a little later had to content themselves with occupying Jamaica, at that time a small, poor Spanish island, sparsely populated and virtually undefended. The raids of English privateers and pirates in the Caribbean continued, suffice it to remember the name of Henry Morgan, but without any new, major territorial conquests. In the first decades of the 1700s, the main activities of Great Britain in the Caribbean were the legal sale of slaves to Spanish America, under the so-called Asiento, and extensive smuggling. Smuggling was a widespread activity all over the Atlantic and it particularly threatened the interests of the Spanish Crown, as we have seen in the first article of this series.
In the first decades of the 1700s, Spain fought back successfully by arming a considerable number of so-called guardacostas (coast guards). They were fast ships, equipped with the contribution of ship owners and privateers that, sailing mainly from La Havana and Santiago, attacked and seized smuggler ships, sharing then the booty with the Spanish authorities. Soon the line between legally seizing foreign smuggler ships and simply plundering ships trading legally was crossed, as was common practice at the time, and the guardacostas became a real scourge for British navigation in the Caribbean.
On April 1731 the British brig Rebecca was sailing, probably not far from La Havana, when a Spanish guardacostas stopped and boarded it, looking for smuggled goods. What really happened on board is not clear and at the moment it seemed a trifling event. But seven years later, in 1738, the Rebecca’s Captain Robert Jenkins exhibited to a committee of the House of Commons his own left ear, cut off by the Spanish who – he said - also pillaged the ship and insulted the British King. British public opinion was already angry with Spain for other “outrages” on British ships and war began in October 1739, later called “War of Jenkins’ ear”. The British tried to detach the Cubans from their loyalty to the Spanish Crown by officially promising the total safeguard of their estates and their Catholic religion, as well as the freedom to trade within the British Empire and the elimination of many taxes.
Obviously, Jenkins’ ear was only a pretext. Like many other wars of the 1700s, this war was motivated only by economic interests, without any ideal motive, unlike, for example, the (terrible) religious wars of the previous century. The underlying reasons were different. For centuries England had coveted the riches of the Indies, and now it felt strong enough to aim for the biggest prize of all: the conquest of Cuba, the largest and richest island in the Caribbean.
We have an exceptional testimony about the real motives of Great Britain. In 1735 a Spanish officer in La Habana, Don Gaspar Courselle, was approached by British agents who asked him to put himself at the service of Great Britain. Courselle pretended to accept, saying he was willing to sell military secrets and all kinds of information about Cuba. Welcomed with open arms, he had the opportunity to meet many civilian and military officials, travel extensively in the North American Colonies and in Great Britain itself, until he deemed it prudent to go back to Spain. In his report to the Spanish Crown he wrote that (the English) “wanted to seize the island of Cuba as soon as possible, claiming that with … said island they would hold the key to the Indies.” Seizing Cuba would in fact make it possible to control also the main commercial routes of the time between Europe and the Spanish Main.
Besides, there were the North America Colonies which by then had become quite a significant economic and demographic reality within the British Empire. While William Wood, an important official of the British Treasury, was openly in favor of the occupation of Cuba, because he could see the great advantages for the economy of the North America colonies, in the colonies themselves, and especially in Massachusetts, a vast movement of public opinion had developed, determined to take possession of Cuba. Not only the merchants who wanted to trade freely with the largest island of the Caribbean, but also the common colonists wanted to occupy Cuba, where they were convinced they could settle and create thriving farming settlements, also due to false information about the mildness and healthiness of the climate there. In 1740 the Governor of Jamaica, Edward Trelawny, wrote: “In short, there’s an ebullient spirit among the colonists of the North, who in their imagination have already swallowed all of Cuba.”
On 28 July 1741 a large fleet under the command of Admiral Edward Vernon, (the very same!) landed with a strong contingent of British regular troops and North American volunteers on the then virtually uninhabited Guantanamo Bay with the aim of capturing Santiago and the eastern part of Cuba. The expedition ended up in an unmitigated disaster, due to the effective reaction of the Spanish and to the epidemics that scourged the invasion troops, causing hundreds of casualties; the survivors re-boarded their ships on 27 November. There were many North American volunteers among the victims and many were the complaints and the grievances of the survivors against the behavior of the British officers. Some historians think that on Cuban soil, during this expedition, the first signs could be seen of that Anglophobia that 35 years later would bring the Thirteen Colonies to the War of Independence.
The failure of Vernon’s expedition showed the relative recovery of Spanish power under the Bourbon regime, with its more modern economic and naval policy. A little later, an expedition which set out from La Havana successfully attacked some English settlements in Georgia. Anyway, the war ended in 1748 with a compromise peace, without any significant changes in the relations between Spain and Britain, apart from the end of the Asiento, two years later.
Now let us go back to Cuban rum. In the first half of the 1700s, sugar production in Cuba experienced a series of ups and downs, and it was the tobacco of the island which attracted the greatest interest of the Crown. However, in general sugar production increased considerably. One year after the end of the war, in 1749, there were 62 sugarcane plantations in La Habana. In 1761 there were 98, and they were larger.
And where there is sugar, sooner or later there is rum too. I think it may be useful to quote again what Jacobo de la Pezuela would write the following century in his classic “Diccionarío … de la Isla de Cuba” (Dictionary … of the Island of Cuba) 1863: “The distilling of aguardientes de caña is nearly as old as the plantations themselves and its production method has remained largely the same for two centuries, even more stagnant than sugar production itself. It is produced on all well managed plantations in a specific department, sometimes separated from the main building where sugar is made, and which is named after the very apparatus it contains, the alembic”.
Despite the pleas of the Cuban Planters and the evidence of a massive, clandestine production which it was impossible to eradicate, the prohibition to produce and sell rum was maintained; indeed in 1749 the legal persecution became even stronger. From that date onwards, rum production was to be punished not only with fines and the destruction of the pot stills, but also with the confiscation and destruction of the sugar mills. The fines were numerous. For example, in December 1749 three planters were fined 2.200 reales each because they were caught producing aguardiente, and three owners of pot stills in La Havana were sentenced to pay a fine of 733 reales each.
The local authorities understood the importance of rum for the economy of the plantations and the difficulty of enforcing the law, and on various occasions they tried to persuade the Spanish Government in Madrid to change its mind. Here is what Francisco Antonio Caxigal de la Vega, Governor of Cuba between 1747 and 1760, wrote in 1751 to the powerful Minister Marques de la Ensenada: “Regarding aguardiente de caña I greatly encouraged the planters to continue with their appeals, preparing documents which can explain the situation … It would be more grievous for this island to deprive it of aguardiente than bread; without aguardiente de caña the hospitals wouldn’t be able to bear the cost of grape spirit. On top of that, there are days when the grape spirit from the Canary Islands simply cannot be found, except for what is left unsold because spoiled. … And even if the grape spirit from Spain is found, the people don’t want to drink it because they say it burns.” The Governor concluded by saying that the production of aguardiente de caña could be permitted in exchange for a yearly duty of 10.000 pesos, which the Havana planters ought to pay. But despite everything, a law of 1758 reiterated the prohibition, and we know that in the previous years 9 pot stills had been destroyed in La Havana alone with heavy fines, and another 12 had been confiscated.
In 1758 the Havana planters launched the last, major offensive for the legalization of aguardiente de caña. They offered to make a donation of 150.000 pesos to the Crown and the introduction of a consumption tax in exchange for the much-desired end of the prohibition. Once again, the request was unsuccessful and the prohibition was maintained. The arguments of the Havana planters went unheeded until 1764, when the old monopolistic conceptions of colonial mercantilism began to give way. But before reaching that goal, another, decisive event of Big History had to take place: the Seven Years’ War (1756 – 1763). The great conflict between France and Great Britain for supremacy in Europe and all over the World also paved the way for the humble legalization of rum in Cuba. Among the novelties introduced after the restoration of Spanish power in La Havana after the English occupation, a tax was levied on the production of aguardiente de caña, which finally gained the long-awaited official recognition. Since then, rum became a legitimate part of the sugar industry in Cuba (but not yet throughout the Spanish Empire). As we are going to see in the next articles.
Marco Pierini
