Narciso López

The title of this article is ambiguous. For the football player of the same name, see Narciso López (football player) .

Narciso López de Urriola (* 1797 in Caracas , Venezuela , † September 1, 1851 in Havana , Cuba ) was of great importance for the emergence of the Cuban independence movement against the Spanish colonial power in the 19th century.

As an annexationist and filibuster , he had the plan to incorporate Cuba as a further federal state into the United States of America .

Life

Narciso López

Narciso López came from a wealthy family and joined the Venezuelan independence movement against Spain . He later switched sides and entered Spanish military service. With the Spanish troops withdrawing from Venezuela in 1823, López first went to Cuba and later to Spain, where he took part in the First Carlist War .

In 1836 he was made Brigadier General and in 1839 Major General and was to become Governor of Valencia. When Jerónimo Valdés was appointed Governor General of Cuba in 1841 , he took López there with him, who took on important functions in the colonial administration under his leadership (governor of Matanzas and Trinidad, as well as chairman of the military commission).

The subsequent governor-general in Cuba, Leopoldo O'Donnell , relieved López of his offices, whereupon López retired into civilian life.

He married the daughter of the influential landowner and slave owner Pozos Dulces y Yznaga .

Obviously López made the political goals of these big landowners his own, which consisted in the demand for free trade and the continuation of slavery. Free trade in Cuba was not possible under Spanish rule because the Spanish crown was particularly interested in the customs revenue from Cuban trade. As another state in the USA, the Cuban landowners had a large market for their products, especially sugar, but on the other hand also found guarantees for the continued existence of slavery in Cuba in the southern states of the USA. The annexationism of the large landowners of the Cuban West, i.e. the desire to join the United States, developed from these interests.

In 1848 López joined a revolutionary group and had to flee to New York in 1849 . With his participation, a Cuban interest group was established there, which pursued the separation of Cuba from Spain with political, economic and military means and which only lost its importance in 1898 with the withdrawal of Spain from Cuba.

To finance his military plans, López was able to win over the American "King of the Railways" Cornelius Vanderbilt .

The first plans to cross over to Cuba with an invading army from the USA failed because the northern states, unlike the southern states of the USA, had no interest in adding another slave-holding state to the confederation.

Finally, on May 19, 1850, Narciso López landed at the head of an expedition choir with 600 men, to whom he had promised US $ 1,000 and 64 hectares of land each, in Cárdenas ( Matanzas province ), Cuba. This attempt failed after just one day and Narciso López now prepared another attack from New Orleans .

Bahia Honda Expedition

The Narciso López flag prevailed as the national flag

On August 3, 1851 López left with 453 mercenaries , including numerous Germans and Hungarians , with the steamer Pampero New Orleans and landed on August 12 at Bahía Honda in the province of Pinar del Río . López had chosen the landing site on the basis of deliberately spread false information from the Cuban captain general.

The expedition turned into a disaster when López's rearguard under William S. Crittenden was wiped out by Spanish General Manuel Enna. Enna López then attacked Los Pozos on August 14, after which the filibusters withdrew to the surrounding mountains. On August 31, López was arrested and sentenced to death by the Garrote as a traitor in Havana . He died on September 1, 1851. Participants in the expedition were u. a. Major Louis Schlesinger, who later took part in filibuster expeditions to Nicaragua with William Walker .

Significance for Cuban History

The current flag of Cuba is the same that Narciso López carried on his expedition to Cárdenas in 1850. This makes it clear what significance his undertakings later had for the Cuban independence movement against Spain. While Carlos Manuel de Céspedes began the struggle against Spanish colonial rule for a sovereign Cuban state with a completely different flag on October 10, 1868 , the annexionist flag of Narciso López prevailed against that of Céspedes in the following discussions in the parliament of Guaímaro . The reason for this was obviously the fears of the slave-holding large landowners in the Cuban west of a slave revolt. While the Creole upper class of the Cuban East (Oriente) saw no economic benefit in slavery, the sugar bourgeoisie of the West (Occidente) wanted a new protecting power, which instead of the previous colonial power could also secure their interests militarily. They saw this new protecting power in the USA.

With the growing Cuban national consciousness, the role of Narciso López in Cuban historiography was viewed more and more critically in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries.

literature

• Robert E. May: Manifest destiny's underworld. Filibustering in antebellum America , Chapel Hill, NC u. a. (University of North Carolina Press) 2002. ISBN 0-8078-2703-7
• Frederic Rosengarten jr .: Freebooters must! The life and death of William Walker, the most notorious filibuster of the 19th century , Wayne, PA (Haverford House) 1976.
• Robert L. Scheina: Latin America's wars. Vol. 1: The age of the caudillo, 1791-1899 , Washington, DC (Brassey) 2003. ISBN 1-574-88450-6

Web links

• latinamericanstudies.org , engl.
• Narciso López in the official Cuban online encyclopedia EcuRed (Spanish)