Johnson Sherry. Climate and Catastrophe in Cuba and the Atlantic World in the Age of Revolution
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acknowledgments
During the completion of this book, I have incurred many debts, both
personal and professional. I am grateful for the funding I received from
several institutions, including the Lydia Cabrera Award Commiee of the
Conference on Latin American History; the JayI. Kislak Foundation, Inc.;
the National Endowment for the Humanities Extending the Reach Re-
search Grant; the Center for Latin American Studies and the University
of Florida Libraries at the University of Florida; the Library Company
of Philadelphia, Program in Early American Economy and Society; the
Rachel Carson Center for Environmental Studies Fellowship, Deutsches
Museum, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany; the Span-
ish Ministerio de Educacción y Ciencia (award HUM2006–00454/HIST);
and the Historic St.Augustine Research Institute at Flagler College, His-
toric St.Augustine Research Foundation. I further acknowledge the gen-
erous assistance of the JohnD. and CatherineT. MacArthur Foundation,
the Ford Foundation, and the Christopher Reynolds Foundation via their
awards to the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International Univer-
sity, and for the continuing support from the Department of History, the
Latin American and Caribbean Center, and the Cuban Research Institute,
the College of Arts and Sciences, the Department of Sponsored Research,
and the Florida International Foundation/Provost’s Oce, at Florida In-
ternational University.
I am also indebted to the various archival repositories and institutions
and their professional sta members— all of which made this book pos-
sible— including the Archivo General de Indias; the Archivo General de
Simancas; the Biblioteca Nacional de España; the Archivo Histórico dela
Nación; the Archivo Provincial de Cádiz; the Archivo Nacional de Cuba;
the Biblioteca Nacional de Cuba José Martí; the Archbishop of Havana’s
Archives; the Archive in S.M.I. Catedral; the Archivo Provincial de Pinar
del Río; the Archivo Provincial de Santa Clara; the Archivo Municipal
de Santiago de Cuba; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the
Massachuses Historical Society; the Peabody Essex Museum; the His-
torical Society of Pennsylvania; the Library Company of Philadelphia;
the Howard-Tildon Memorial Library, Tulane University; the Library of
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acknowledgments
Congress; the Diocese of St.Augustine Catholic Center; the P.K. Yonge
Library and the Latin American Collection at the University of Florida;
the Cuban Collection at the University of Miami; and Special Collections
of Green Library at Florida International University.
I am particularly grateful to the many professionals who over the years
have encouraged my interest in Cuba. In Spain, José Hernández Palomo,
G.Douglas Inglis, Manuel Salvador Vásquez, María Dolores Gonzáles
Ripoll Navarro, and Consuelo Naranjo oered helpful advice. Scholars
of Cuba who have generously provided guidance from the inception of
this project include AllanJ. Kuethe, FranklinW. Knight, JohnR. McNeill,
LindaK. Salvucci, Jean Stubbs, and K.Lynn Stoner. This work could not
have been completed without the cooperation and friendship of many
scholars in Cuba, including María Carmen Bárcia, Jorge Ibarra, Fé Igle-
sias, Gloria García, Mercedes García, René González, Sergia Martínez,
Olga Portuondo, PedroM. Pruna, and Oscar Zanei. Christof Mauch
and Helmuth Trischler deserve special thanks for creating a “scholarly
Shangri-La” at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, where the nal dra
of the manuscript was completed, and, as always, every scholar of Cuba is
in debt to LouisA. Pérez Jr. To all of these people, I extend my sincerest
appreciation.
Former colleagues at the University of Florida to whom I am indebted
include Bruce Chappell, JamesE. Cusick, Keith Manuel, and John Ingram.
Special thanks are extended to Latin Americanists DavidA. Bushnell, Neill
Macaulay, MurdoJ. MacLeod, MichaelE. Moseley, and Robin Lauriault,
who over the years have contributed helpful ideas along with uncomfort-
able questions to help me think through the structure of this book. I owe
special debts to César Caviedes, RichardS. Olson, RobertH. Claxton, and
Victor Bulmer-Thomas for their solid advice, which helped improve the
manuscript immensely. My colleagues at Florida International University,
MarkD. Szuchman, N.David Cook, Victor Uribe-Urán, Lisandro Pérez,
Uva de Aragón, Damián Fernández, DardenA. Pyron, and Gwyn Davies,
have been a continuous source of support. I am privileged to have stud-
ied and worked with these friends and scholars. Without the friendship
of Bill Waller, Karen Waller, Lynne Guitar, Ron Lewis, Nancy Macaulay,
Alexandra Cook, CharloeA. Cosner, KarenY. Morrison, Ian Maynard,
and Kathy Bauman, life as an academic would have been dicult, if not
impossible.
acknowledgments
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This book is dedicated to my parents, EdgarW. and Marianne Shelly
Johnson, oridanos from 1933 through the 1950s. Long before satellite im-
ages gave early warning of an approaching hurricane, they, like many fami-
lies in the tropics, instilled in me the resilience to weather many storms.
This book is dedicated to their memory.
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Climate and Catastrophe
in Cuba and the Atlantic World
in the Age of Revolution
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chapter one
Cursed by Nature
C
limate Change! Global Warming! ElNiño and LaNiña!
These phrases, now part of our daily vocabulary, stir emo-
tions and prompt reactions ranging from fear, to anger, to
a feeling of helplessness in the face of impending disaster. For the past
several years, the Caribbean, the southeastern United States, and the Gulf
Coast have endured repeated hurricane strikes, while the Pacic region
has suered through alternating periods of drought-induced wildres
and torrential downpours. Governments are warned to be prepared for
an imminent period of weather-induced environmental crisis caused by a
warming cycle in the earth’s climate.
Decades of research have made “climate change” household words, but
until now the social sciences have rarely utilized scientic discoveries to
understand the connections among climate, catastrophe, environmental
crisis, and historical change. Drawing inspiration from hard science and
contemporary issues, this book will establish that the current phase of
climate-induced stress is not unique and that a similar cycle, a y-year
warm anomaly, occurred during the last ve decades of the eighteenth
century. In addition, historical climatology demonstrates that in the pe-
riod under study (1748–1804) barely a year went by when the world did
not experience the eects of an ElNiño or LaNiña cycle, episodes of
severe, prolonged drought counterbalanced by hurricane activity in the
Atlantic basin. Such scientic facts have lile value, however, unless the
consequences of environmental stress can be shown to coincide with a
known historical narrative.
This book will establish that nexus of science and social science by
demonstrating correlations among the late-eighteenth-century climate
anomaly, the onset of the ElNiño or LaNiña cycle, and historical pro-
cesses. It will argue that— not coincidentally— these phenomena coin-
cided with one of the most critical periods in history, termed the Age of
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cursed by nature
Revolution.1 From the mid-eighteenth century through the rst decades
of the nineteenth century, the Atlantic world from Boston to Barbados and
beyond underwent political upheavals culminating in the United States’
War of Independence, the French Revolution, and the Haitian Revolu-
tion.2 This book builds upon the foundations laid by hard science and
rests on the scientic data provided by research in historical climatology,
then incorporates the techniques and theories from the eld of disaster
studies. It accepts the scientic evidence of prolonged and severe weather
sequences in the laer decades of the eighteenth century, what one of the
leading scholars terms “spasmodic climatic interludes.”3 Borrowing from
multidisciplinary work in economics, sociology, political science, and in-
ternational relations, it will show how disaster in the Caribbean generated
both positive and negative consequences throughout the Atlantic basin.
The timeline of disaster placed alongside a chronology of political, eco-
nomic, and social events demonstrates causal relationships between sci-
entic facts and historical processes.4 This juxtaposition makes clear that
processes and events that traditionally have been aributed to political,
economic, and/or social forces were impacted by, and oen caused by,
weather-induced environmental crises.
The Science
The science that underpins this study is based on historical climatology,
particularly studies of uctuating temperature cycles and climate change.
Beginning with a handful of studies in the 1990s, teams of researchers
all over the globe contributed the results of their individual projects to
an ever-growing body of knowledge about temperature uctuations oc-
curring over several millennia.5 These collective eorts have established
beyond a reasonable doubt that the temperature of the planet varies,
sometimes reaching extremes. One such extreme occurred from the mid-
1400s to approximately 1850, during which the earth’s climate experienced
cooler-than-normal temperatures, a cycle that is known as the Lile Ice
Age.6 Around 1850, the Lile Ice Age began to wane, and the earth en-
tered into a period of warmer temperatures, which the planet continues
to experience to this day. Before that happened, however, the cool cycle
was punctuated by a y-year warm anomaly that began around 1750 and
lasted until about 1800.7 The importance of this warm period in the area
cursed by nature
•
3
under study was that its eects can be correlated with severe weather
events that exhibit the characteristics of ElNiño/LaNiña sequences.8
Until the winter of 1983, when devastating oods hit northern Peru
and made the international news, the extreme weather event known as
an ElNiño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) was unknown to all but a small
group of scientists and geographers. Because the Peruvian ood occurred
during the Christmas season, the event was named for the Christ child,
ElNiño, and the ENSO cycle now is universally recognized by its popular
name. The disaster came as no surprise to the handful of climatologists
and geographers who for several decades had suspected that the ElNiño
was a recurring phenomenon.9 Over time, as climatologists studied global
weather systems, they learned that such systems are not just recurring but
even are interrelated. In turn, they coined a term, “teleconnections,” to
explain how a weather phenomenon in one area is mirrored by certain
characteristics in another.10
For reasons that are still being debated, an ElNiño begins with the
warming of tropical Pacic waters, which leads to torrential rainfall along
the coast of the Americas. Scientists quickly realized that the conse-
quences of an ElNiño event are not limited to the Pacic region. While
the Pacic Coast suered from too much rainfall, other tropical zones,
including Mexico, the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa, were hit by
severe, prolonged drought. Worse still, the end of an ElNiño event did
not mean the end of environmental stress. Researchers further discovered
that ElNiño has a malevolent twin sister, LaNiña, who accompanies her
destructive brother by causing increased hurricane activity in the Carib-
bean and the Atlantic basin. In some ways, the evil twin is worse, because
LaNiña impacts tropical regions already stressed from drought.11
A primary goal of this study, then, is to establish whether the signa-
ture characteristics of the ElNiño and LaNiña cycles impacted the Ca-
ribbean basin from about 1750 through 1804. The existing information,
chronological lists of hurricanes for the Caribbean and for the United
States compiled more than four decades ago, proved to be incomplete,
so documentary repositories throughout the Atlantic world were scoured
for evidence to establish that the signature consequences of the destruc-
tive twins aected Cuba and its neighboring regions such as Puerto Rico,
Louisiana, Florida, and the Caribbean lioral. Yet simply adding to the ex-
isting chronology of hurricanes was not enough to indicate the existence