Hatuey

The arrival of the colonizers to the land that Christopher Columbus had defined as the most beautiful that human eyes had ever seen brought a new life to the inhabitants of the island.

Their peace had ended, and fugitives from the island of La Española also arrived here, and the cacique Hatuey was one of them…There he had fought without rest….Here he tried to tell the natives about the mistreatment from that white and inhumane people who only sought to enrich themselves at the cost of their labor and the natural riches the region possessed.

Hatuey wanted his peers to throw the gold into the rivers…that they would not obey…that they would resist being part and victim of that unjustifiable plundering. This and no other was his way of rebelling.

It was thus that Hatuey managed to gather men. All of them used spears, arrows, attacked in ambushes, displayed courage…

But shortly after, the leader was captured, tried as a heretic and rebel, tied to a wooden stake, subjected to a punishment that would make him disappear from the face of the earth in the cruelest way possible.

Hatuey resisted, the heat penetrated his skin, February 2, 1512 was passing…his body was about to be converted to ashes…A priest approached him so that he would accept baptism because this would open a better life for him in heaven. Hatuey rejected it, his courage admitted no pleas, and thus he died…barbarously, burned alive.

According to historians, the event took place in the town of Yara in Granma, and through it Diego Velázquez intended to make indigenous resistance disappear. But the truth is that the episode passed into history as yet another example of the despotism and tragedy that accompanied the life of the first inhabitants of the Americas after the arrival of the colonizers.

The Indian Hatuey was burned alive, but his spirit of rebellion still today inspires the peoples who live under the guardianship and the drama imposed by the empire and who need to come together and fight to overcome the foolish aspirations of a few to seize what does not belong to them.

Just after the completion of the Reconquest of Spain, following the surrender of the Moorish king of Granada in January 1492, a witness to the surrender of the city to the kings Ferdinand and Isabella awaits his opportunity to offer the monarchs a new world that he assures exists: the Genoese sailor Christopher Columbus.

When the moment came to present his idea, he achieved, after many setbacks, the support of the Queen. The adventure of conquest and colonization would begin shortly after, on August 3, 1492, with the departure of three caravels from the port of Palos. The Indian Hatuey—or Yahatuey, as Diego Velásquez would call him—had about twenty years of life remaining, as he would pay among the flames for the rebellion shown against the invaders, becoming the first hero and martyr of the struggle against Spanish colonization, the first organizer of resistance and the first foreigner to give his life for Cuba.

Crowned with the triumph of Columbus's ideas about the existence of other lands promised to the Spanish Crown, the other immediate result was the beginning of the odyssey of the peaceful inhabitants of a world that clashed with another civilization.

Those inhabitants received in amazement men with breastplates and strange weapons, which would lacerate and pierce their bodies, until depriving them of the freedom they enjoyed in the places where they lived, where the caciques exercised their authority over tribes that only used their arrows and rudimentary spears to face the incursions of the Caribs, who attacked in search of women and food, and then returned to their islands.

The inhabitants of the lands that Spain would dominate were the owners of those territories, where they worked, danced, performed rituals dedicated to their gods, had their partners and their children, ignorant that others would come to deprive them of theirs, to kill them or enslave them and to impose another religion and other customs upon them, including a language they could not understand. Cuba and Haiti or Quisqueya would become the scenes where the struggle, death, and extermination of the aboriginals would begin.

In Cuba, in particular, human presence had already been felt ten thousand years before Columbus arrived at its shores on October 28, 1492. With the arrival of the colonizers, in the Caribbean archipelago began the immense suffering of its inhabitants, until culminating in their annihilation.

First, the Admiral arrived on October 12 at an island in the Bahamas called Guanahaní by its inhabitants and renamed by Columbus as San Salvador, estimated today to be the island of Watling. He then learned of a large island to the south, which turned out to be Cuba, sighting its coasts at dusk on the 27th of that same month and anchoring the next day in a port that he also named San Salvador, the current bay of Bariay. After traveling along the north coast of eastern Cuba, the sailor left Maisí behind on December 5, and navigated until reaching Haiti or Quisqueya, which he called La Española and which later became the headquarters of the conquerors, who with vandal acts caused the aboriginals to abandon their initial passivity and kill the garrison of 39 men that had been left in the fort La Navidad. The rebellion against the brutality of the foreigners was showing its first signs.

After a trip to Spain, Columbus returned to La Española to undertake the definitive conquest and colonization of the previously unknown lands. Two characters who would make history arrived with him: the father Bartolomé de las Casas and Diego Velásquez, the first representing the cross, and the second the sword.

The aboriginals of Cuba, like those of Haiti or Quisqueya, were hospitable and followed their traditions, but as Fernando Ortiz wrote, "the tenacious and heroic resistances of the Indians to their subjugation demonstrated the virile temper of their spirit."

The conquerors' thirst for gold, and the methods of slavery and death imposed on the natives of Cuba and other islands, awakened the feeling of rejection toward the newcomers. In La Española there were uprisings of tribes or chiefdoms and the rebellious spirit germinated in those who fought under conditions of obvious inequality.

In the region of Guahabá, on the island of Haiti or Quisqueya, the Indian Hatuey was a subordinate cacique, subordinated to Behechio, the great cacique of the province of Jaraguá. Hatuey achieved his period of greatest brilliance years after the appearance of the conquerors, when he rebelled and fought. He was one of the chiefs among whom the command of his native island was distributed and he was followed by his people in games, songs, and dances, as well as in wars with rival tribes or against invasions of the Caribs, whom they never could defeat. He knew how to maintain his authority and preserved the unity of his group, peace, and dedication to work. When he learned of Columbus's arrival and his men, he preferred not to see them, in rejection of their presence.

With black hair and eyes, Hatuey was of regular size, broad shoulders, strong arms, and a short neck. When the abuses against the Indians became widespread, especially in the labor of gold extraction, in the region of Guahabá the rebellion was initiated by Hatuey, confronting the troops sent to the place by the governor of La Española, Nicolás de Ovando, in search of more men for those grueling tasks. The indomitable cacique refused to deliver any of his subjects and the Spanish retreated, fearful before the numerical superiority of the natives. A few days later the conquerors would return with superior forces in number and weapons, with the first combat between the Spanish and Hatuey's men taking place, who, faced with the impossibility of triumphing, retreated to the forests. The invader occupied Guahabá, where the Spanish founded two towns, and Hatuey, with his people, took refuge in the mountains. Later, in canoes, with about four hundred Indians, he would arrive at Maisí, the last battlefield of the valorous cacique and the first leader ready to organize the struggles in Cuba.

It cost Hatuey much effort to convince the inhabitants of Maisí that those who had arrived from Guahabá were peaceful people fleeing from the white conquerors. It was the cacique Baracoa who understood and received as brothers the men from Haiti or Quisqueya, allowing them to create, on the banks of the Toa, a new Guahabá, where Hatuey began to preach against the colonizers and maintained his condition as chief.

There he prepared the defense, for he knew that the enemy would reach that place in search of the "little golden stones," already considered by him as a sign of misfortune for his people. With eloquent words, he showed the danger to the aboriginals from Guahabá and Cuba.

Some time later, Diego Colón, son of the Admiral, appointed governor of La Española, designated Diego Velásquez for the same position in Cuba, replacing Bartolomé Colón, his uncle. The eagerness to find gold was present in the offspring of the Genoese, who urged Velásquez to find it as soon as possible.

This did not take long in gathering three hundred Spanish and a group of Indians from La Española to form an expedition that departed for Cuba to colonize the Island. Various dates are given about the departure, but it is obvious that it was at least months before August 15, 1511, when Velásquez founded in Baracoa the First City of America.

Soon the group arrived, which had departed from Salvatierra de la Sabana and landed at the port called Las Palmas, which perhaps was that of Guantánamo, or some other between there and Maisí. Velásquez already suspected that the aboriginals would not receive him with sympathy.

Hatuey did not delay in preparing the attack and ordered all the gold thrown into the river, thinking, with a certain naïveté, that the absence of the metal in his group's hands would placate the ambition and evil of the Spanish. The women and children were taken to the forest. With their bows, arrows, and spears, the men of the brave cacique prepared to fight protected by the denseness of the forest. The first combat took place shortly after the landing, as the Indian sentries had already given the signal of alarm. Very soon the arquebuses prevailed over the primitive weapons of the rebels. Many dead Indians and a few Spanish slightly wounded was the result of that first battle and initial defeat of Hatuey's subjects. The pioneers in the defense of the freedom of these lands paid with their lives. But the insurgent chief gathered his people days later to attack again, although he failed to count on the support of Cuban caciques from other regions, who decided not to join that rebellion.

Hatuey only had a few forces made up of fugitives from Haiti or Quisqueya and some natives from Maisí, Baracoa, Bayamo, and other nearby areas. The Indians possessed numerical superiority, but their combat effectiveness was almost nil, so that, facing the military supremacy of the Spanish, Hatuey used guerrilla warfare as strategy and ambushes as tactics. This forced his enemies to halt their advances for two or three months and to make great and prolonged efforts to try to defeat the constant and dispersed offensive of the Indians. The use by Velásquez of tracker dogs, brought from La Española, provided him with some advantages and disturbance to the aboriginals, who were discovered by the dogs in their hideouts.

Hatuey's guerrilla actions infuriated the chief of the conquerors, who with his energetic and violent character urged his lieutenants to catch him. It was the betrayal of an Indian that led to the capture of the cacique. The informer revealed the hiding place, moved by revenge due to old grievances with Hatuey in the lands of Guahabá. Velásquez's soldiers, led by the informer, managed to surround and capture him. The rebellion was left without a leader and for the Indians there would be only slavery and extermination.

Hatuey was brought before Velázquez, who inquired about the place where the gold could be, but the cacique said he knew nothing about it. The conqueror threatened to burn him alive, but the Indian, without flinching, said he preferred to die by the violence of the flames than to be enslaved by white men. It was then that Velásquez ordered Hatuey be taken to the pyre without delay.

The priest Juan de Tesín, a Franciscan who accompanied the conquerors, asked Velásquez to permit him to try to baptize Hatuey so that he would die "as a Christian and in the grace of God." Having obtained approval with difficulty, in the camp of the chief of the colonizing forces—established in Manacas, between Manzanillo and the Sierra Maestra—the troops prepared themselves to consummate the first sacrifice of a fighter for Cuba's freedom.

Four men brought the rebel cacique to the post where he would be burned. Velásquez went there to offer to save his life in exchange for revealing the place where the gold was, obtaining as an answer that the golden metal had disappeared and the Spanish would never know its final destination. The conqueror, in a fury, immediately ordered the sentence carried out.

The condemned man remained serene while they tied him to the post and piled wood around it. The Father Tesín approached him and asked him to die in the grace of God, to which Hatuey inquired, for what? The priest responded that in this way he would go to heaven, where good Christians go. And the cacique, with fire close to his flesh, clarified to the clergyman that he did not want to go to a heaven "where are the Christians who kill and enslave the Indians." Concluding the brief dialogue, the flames consumed the body of that brave defender of freedom.

His torture, on February 2, 1512, was a warning to the aboriginals to dominate them under the rule of fear and force.

Other caciques later followed Hatuey's example in confrontation with the conquerors, among them Guamá—killed at the hands of the Spanish on June 7, 1533—, Caguas, Habaguanex, Casiguaya—wife of Guamá—, and some others.

Source: Historiador. Portal de la Historia de Cuba