Cuba

Cuba was, according to the historian Félix Luengo, the third favoured destination of Basque emigration in America, behind Argentina and Uruguay, and the most commercial of them all: the Basques of the island were above all traders and craftsmen and, in the nineteenth century, senior officials of the colonial administration and great landowners. They did not live packed into Havana but spread across more than a hundred towns. The war of 1898 marked the end of that colony: those who left were, above all, the best-placed families. What remained was a nineteenth-century benevolent society that reached the twenty-first on the verge of closing and that, once restored, celebrated its 140th anniversary in 2017 with more than five hundred members.²

During the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth, the Basque who arrived in Cuba usually came to trade, in the wake of the Real Compañía de La Habana, a trading company with mostly Basque capital. Many others were craftsmen, carpenters above all, and nearly all of them lived in Havana. Between 1800 and 1830, the embarkation licences in the Archivo de Indias put the Basques at around 13% of the Spaniards who crossed to the island.²

In the nineteenth century they climbed higher. There were Basques and Navarrese in the senior posts of the colonial administration and among the great merchants and landowners; according to Juan Bosco Amores, between 1833 and 1865 there were 126 Basque merchants registered in Cuba, most of them in Havana.¹ Their relative weight, on the other hand, fell when Canary Islanders, Asturians and Galicians arrived in large numbers: in 1859 there were reckoned to be 3,842 Basques and Navarrese on the island, 4.6% of the Spaniards.² Even so, Cuba kept drawing them. Of the ten thousand or so Basques and Navarrese who left for America between 1885 and 1895 according to the official register of emigrants, close to three thousand, almost 30%, went to Cuba.¹

They also went to war. In 1869-1870, on the initiative of the Junta de Comercio de Bilbao (Bilbao Board of Trade), the Tercios Vascongados were raised, a volunteer corps for the war in Cuba. More than a thousand men took part, and at least five hundred had died before 1873.¹

The Basques of Cuba in 1899

After the war of 1898 and the Treaty of Paris, the Secretaría de Estado y Gobernación de Cuba (Cuba’s Department of State and Government) drew up in 1899 a Registro General de Españoles (General Register of Spaniards), which is kept in the Archivo Nacional de Cuba. Luengo studied it closely, and thanks to it the Basque community can be seen up close at the moment the colony was coming to an end.²

The register records 2,455 heads of household born in the Basque and Navarrese provinces: 1,139 from Bizkaia, 741 from Navarre, 390 from Gipuzkoa and 183 from Araba. The Basques of Cuba were more than that, because the register does not count wives or children, nor anyone who had given up Spanish nationality.²

They were not in Havana but spread across the whole island. Santa Clara had 693; Matanzas, 533; the province of Havana, 489. Basques are recorded as living in 114 towns: the city of Havana had 351, Cienfuegos 195, Matanzas 140, Cárdenas 104 and Sagua 83.²

Trade was still their main occupation (42.7%), followed by farming (17.6%), day labourers (11.6%) and craftsmen (11.5%).²

Others had already gone. An incomplete register of passengers from the port of Havana records the departure of 396 Basque families between July 1896 and November 1898. Luengo believes that the loss weighed more for who left, the best-placed families, than for how many.²