By Thomas Mareite

This article is part of our series entitled “Exiled: Identity and Identification,” which explores the semantic evolution of exile and the lived experiences of people seeking refuge across the Atlantic World during the long nineteenth century. It was presented originally at the conference “Who is a Refugee? Concepts of Exile, Refuge and Asylum, c.1750-1850”, which took place on 30 June – 1 July 2022 at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany.

This publication is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 849189).

Havana found itself at the center of the shock waves of imperial warfare and revolution that rocked the Atlantic world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As political unrest and slave revolts broke out in the early 1790s across the French colony of Saint-Domingue, soon spreading across the border to Spanish Santo Domingo, the Cuban city turned into a transnational haven of exile for colonists seeking refuge from revolutionary turmoil on the neighboring island of Hispaniola. 

First, while the Haitian Revolution gradually escalated into a full-blown war for abolition and national independence (1791-1804), Cuba became one of the main beacons of asylum for refugees from Saint-Domingue, where their arrival aroused fears of revolutionary contagion and elicited anxieties of “race war”. Second, following Spain’s formal cession of Santo Domingo to the French Republic in July 1795 — in return for peninsular lands lost during the war waged against France over the previous two years — about 4,000 settlers from the former Spanish colony sought exile on the “Ever Faithful” island of Cuba, out of at least 10,000 so-called “emigrados de Santo Domingo” scattered across the Spanish Caribbean.^[1] Cuba’s appeal to these French- and Spanish-speaking colonists lay in the legal protections it offered to property titles over enslaved people, as well as the availability of abundant land, combined with tax policies designed to support plantation exports.

Map of Hispaniola in 1796. Source: John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

As per generic royal instructions issued in September 1795, settlers from Santo Domingo who wished to resettle within the Spanish Empire were given one year to freely evacuate the island with their properties — in practice the deadline was extended, reflecting the colony’s protracted transfer to France. Departures continued in the following years, especially following Toussaint Louverture’s swift takeover of Santo Domingo on behalf of France in early 1801, which materialized the cession by force and caused close to 2,000 residents to leave the island. Although emigrados from Santo Domingo also relocated in large numbers to Puerto Rico and Venezuela, Cuba — and Havana in particular — became their favorite destination.^[2]

In accordance with royal instructions, free “emigrados” from Santo Domingo began receiving financial relief for their subsistence and accommodation from the Havana branch of the royal treasury, while enslaved people were not entitled to such assistance. The Junta de Emigrados, an ad hoc council composed of a handful of prominent figures from the city’s political elites, coordinated the distribution of allowances to emigrados and examined their requests for relief. As imperial officials urging for remittances from New Spain endlessly pointed out, relief to emigrados in Havana proved to be an institutional and financial challenge, with pensions bearing down on a continuously strained royal treasury in Cuba. Yet in a moment of spatial reconfiguration that foreshadowed (albeit on a smaller scale) the Spanish Empire’s geographical shift from the 1820s onwards, the provision of relief by colonial authorities to emigrados served as a crucial instrument for reasserting imperial ties of belonging to the vast transatlantic Spanish nation. 

In the petitions sent to the council, emigrados articulated their demands for imperial support around generic tropes of unfailing loyalty to Spain, regardless of the material, social, and emotional costs involved. However, beyond appeals to a collective identity and emigrados status, relief was however largely underpinned by particularistic claims to monarchical benevolence based on exclusive socioeconomic, racial, and corporate statuses. Colonial officials, for one, distinguished between emigrados of so-called “plebeian” or “distinguished” calidad (status) when distributing basic or maximal allowances. In fact, imperial support for emigrados in Havana essentially sought to re-naturalize the socioeconomic order and the racial hierarchies that had existed in Santo Domingo within an exiled community strongly fragmented by colonial regimes of differentiation. For instance, although black emigrados who could provide proof of their freedom prior to their exile from Santo Domingo were formally integrated into this relief program, their pensions were, by design, less generous than those of their white counterparts. 

The label of emigrados, as a sociopolitical identity and administrative status to which expectations of relief were linked, became even less homogeneous and more complex as many refugees from Saint-Domingue began to resettle in Cuba (often from or via Santo Domingo) during the early years of unrest in the French colony. As recent studies have pointed out, the Spanish part of Hispaniola became deeply involved in the political and social revolutions that swept through Saint-Domingue from 1791 onwards, which turned the Haitian Revolution into a true trans-imperial conflict on an island-wide scale. With the outbreak of open warfare between France and Spain — both in Europe and in the Americas — in 1793, civilian populations increasingly took refuge in the Spanish part of Hispaniola or simply became Spanish vassals after taking an oath of allegiance when Spanish forces conquered French settlements, as was the case of Fort-Dauphin (northern Saint-Domingue) in early 1794. 

As colonial correspondence shows, Spanish imperial officials often referred to Saint-Domingue refugees seeking asylum in the Spanish Caribbean as “emigrados franceses”. In doing so, they created an initial semantic source of confusion between foreign and native exiles — although the term “emigrados franceses” did not carry the presumption of imperial support that was attributed to native or long-term resident Spanish subjects in Santo Domingo. This also applied to colonists from Saint-Domingue who had taken refuge on the other side of the Spanish border before 1795. However, a significant number of these “emigrados franceses” began to receive pensions from the Spanish royal treasury in Santo Domingo because of their credentials (or those of relatives) in the service of the Spanish Crown or on account of perceived individual vulnerabilities such as widowhood, old age, disability, illness or simply severe destitution. In July 1794, for instance, Spanish officials in San Juan drew up a list of 39 “emigrados franceses” who had received financial assistance (from 2 to 4 reales a day) during the previous month.^[3] The case of these refugees of French origin supported by the Spanish royal treasury illuminates how, at times, assessments of imperial loyalty and humanitarian considerations overrode subjecthood in the distribution of relief to exiles.

General Plan for the Fortification of Saint Domingo. Source: Library of Congress

After 1795, fearing reprisals and seeking to flee from French abolitionist legislation, most of the “emigrados franceses” who benefited from such allowances moved to Cuba where they enjoyed “hospitality” — a term commonly used in colonial correspondence to describe the (temporary) asylum granted to Saint-Domingue refugees — and transferred their entitlement to relief in the process.^[4] Shortly before the evacuation of Fort-Dauphin, Désirée Platil, a native from nearby Cap-Français, had “followed the [Spanish] army in [Fort-Dauphin], arriving in Havana on a ship of the royal navy” in the company of an enslaved man named Guillaume and a black man named José, described in the colonial record as “free but with the same circumstances as a slave”. Once in Havana she successfully claimed the status of emigrada, receiving “a pension from her Catholic Majesty”.^[5] As flows of military and civilian refugees, such as Désirée Platil, spilled over the fluctuating imperial borders in Hispaniola during the early years of the Haitian Revolution, the boundaries of subjecthood became somewhat porous. For instance, while most French refugees remained mere vassals of the Spanish Crown in both Santo Domingo and Cuba, others were formally naturalized as Spaniards, whenever political circumstances permitted. In addition, a significant number of “emigrados” of French origin asked to be recognized as formally belonging to the Spanish nation, especially when they had received support from the Spanish Empire in the past. Thus, in May 1805, Jeanne Angèle Grenot, described as a French national, “emigrada de Santo Domingo”, requested both relief from the Spanish royal treasury in Havana and to be officially considered as “Española dominicana” (Dominican Spanish) for this reason.^[6]

The legacy of these transimperial entanglements, and more generally the presence of French refugees in Cuba, would prove even more problematic when news of the Bonapartist usurpation of the Spanish throne and military occupation of the Iberian Peninsula (1808) reached the island. The vigilance committees charged with handling case-by-case expulsions of French settlers in Cuba beginning in March 1809 unearthed connections forged between former colonists in Saint-Domingue and the Spanish Caribbean — often consecrated by imperial relief — that challenged the very divisions between national communities they sought to reestablish. Asserting their belonging to the transatlantic community of españoles (Spaniards) to their interrogators, a good number of Saint-Domingue refugees in Havana and its hinterland claimed for themselves the status of loyal and subsidized emigrados in their (mostly successful) efforts to elude another exile.

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Thomas Mareite is postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tübingen. His first book, Conditional Freedom: Free Soil and Fugitive Slaves from the U.S. South to Mexico’s Northeast, 1803-1861 (Brill, 2022), explores the experiences of enslaved people who self-emancipated from U.S. slavery by seeking refuge in nineteenth-century Mexico. His current project focuses on Havana and its hinterland as transimperial haven for refugees from the Greater Caribbean during the Age of Revolutions. 

Title Image: Havana in 1798. Courtesy of John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

Further Readings:

Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Graham T. Nessler, An Islandwide Struggle for Freedom: Revolution, Emancipation, and Reenslavement in Hispaniola, 1789-1809. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016. 

Charlton W. Yingling, Siblings of Soil: Dominicans and Haitians in the Age of Revolutions. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2022.

Carlos Esteban Deive, Las Emigraciones Dominicanas a Cuba (1795-1808). Santo Domingo: Fundación Cultural Dominicana, 1989.

Nicolás A. González-Quintero, “Exile and Empire in the 19th-Century Spanish Caribbean”. PhD. Diss. University of Texas at Austin, 2020.

Sarah C. Chambers, “Expatriados en la Madre Patria: El Estado de Limbo de los Emigrados Realistas en el Imperio Español, 1790-1830”, Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina 32:2 (2021): 48-73.

Tamar Herzog, Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003.

Endnotes:

[^[1]] The term emigrados gained traction in the Spanish language in the context of the French Revolution, derived from the French word émigré, to refer to people in exile on political grounds. See Edward Blumenthal and Romy Sanchez, “Toward a History of Latin American Exile in the Nineteenth-Century. Introduction”, Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina 32:2 (2021): 7-21.

[^[2]] Cristina Soriano, Tides of Revolution: Information, Insurgencies, and the Crisis of Colonial Rule in Venezuela (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2018).

[^[3]] Archivo General de la Nación, Dominican Republic, Reales Cajas de Santo Domingo, Época Colonial Española 26, 6. 

[^[4]] The French National Convention had endorsed in 1794 the series of abolitionist decrees passed in Saint-Domingue by commissioners Polverel and Sonthonax in 1793. 

[^[5]] Archivo General de Indias (AGI), Cuba 1702, Matías Pérez Sánchez to Captain General Someruelos, Bahía Honda, 2 April 1809.

[^[6]] AGI, Cuba 1693, Gómez Roubaud to Someruelos, 6 May 1805.