7
interested in living in elegance, but they felt, prevented from doing so by the predatory
practices of Spanish traders and the demands of Spanish tax collectors.
High on the list of grievances carried by new world elites was a perception among
creole planters that their upward mobility was unfairly restricted by Spanish colonial
authorities. The control of colonial jurisdictions was left in the hands of peninsulares,
Spanish-born court-appointed officials. This administrative distinction drew a clear line
between Spaniards and new-world-born populations. The persistent treatment of creoles
as a community distinguishable from Spaniards and ruled by them, unintentionally
reinforced in the minds of new world elites the perception that they were a distinct society
and they should aspire to control their own fate, as all societies aim to do.
The prospect of slave (and indigenous) rebellion, which inspired fear in creole
planters elsewhere, was, if anything, more immediately feared in Cuba. This was true for
two reasons. First, Cuba became home to planters driven from their lands in Haiti by
Toussaint L’Ouverture’s slave rebellion (Perez, Jr. 1995). These planters brought their
expertise to Cuba, converting it into the Caribbean’s greatest producer of sugar. They also
brought their production methods, dependent on a vast population of slaves. Over the
next eighty years, hundreds of thousands of slaves were brought to Cuba, becoming
nearly one-third of the island’s population (Perez, Jr. 1999, 90). Moreover, living
alongside these slaves, and in the years leading up to the first attempt by Cubans to take
independence from Spain, voicing demands for their emancipation, was a sizeable
community of freedmen. For the planting class, this community of freedmen represented
a source of perpetual agitation, both in that the freedmen actively campaigned for
Convention