The corrupt Galician deputy who enslaved his countrymen in Spanish Cuba without being tried

by time news

December 1853. Galicia experienced one of the rainiest winters in its history. Storms were destroying crops, while a cholera epidemic was wreaking havoc on the population. Desperate, many young people were forced to leave their homes and go to Cuba to earn a living on the sugar cane plantations. As the author points out about one of the protagonists: «Orestes has never touched the sea, he has only seen it from afar. The sea is big and does not end, like hunger, that is why he is not afraid to go into it, because hunger takes away the fear of almost everything». In the 140 pages of ‘Azucre’, Bibiana Candia (La Coruña, 1977) recovers the true story of 1,744 Galicians who crossed the Atlantic to work on the lands of Urbano Feijóo Sotomayor, but ended up sold as slaves. This deputy from Orense took advantage of the need of his countrymen and promoted a colonization campaign with them, promising them a lot of money and decent working conditions. The objective was to replace the workforce that had come from Africa and had begun to claim their rights in small rebellions. For his company, Feijóo Sotomayor even had the support of the Government, which granted him a substantial subsidy. What the unfortunate Galicians did not imagine is that their new destination had an ordeal in store for them. «The Villa de Neda leaves the port of La Coruña as a procession leaves on Holy Thursday, proud, without realizing that, in reality, it is going to celebrate death. But the ocean, which proves to be malignant in this, lets the ship in like someone who opens a secret door and welcomes it like an intimate enemy would”, is also warned in ‘Azucre’. «What prompted me to write the novel is that it was an unknown story not only in Spain, but also in Galicia, where we have a very deep oral tradition and a great pride in emigration. It shocked me that such a tragedy had not been recorded in our collective memory and I became obsessed with it,” Candia explains to ABC about this “fraudulent and criminal” plot that caused a great scandal in the press in the mid-nineteenth century and even it was discussed in the Cortes, but was lost in oblivion. Original list of Galician passengers who went to work with Feijóo Sotomayor in Cuba Archive of the Congress At present, the only vestiges that remain are three letters sent to Spain by some of these Galician slaves and preserved under restricted access in the archive of the Congress of the deputies; a series of documents kept in the Archive of Galician Emigration, which demonstrate the direct involvement of Feijóo Sotomayor, and the lists of passengers who were going to work in Cuba, the latter purchased by a historian, by chance, on eBay. «When the evidence came to light in October 1854, Feijóo assured that he did not know anything and that it was only a residual behavior, but it was not true. A debate was opened on whether slavery was morally correct and a Madrid newspaper, ‘El Clamor Público’, even published a letter from the Galician community that lived in New York and demanded that the Spanish government help their compatriots,” he points out. the author. The almost two thousand workers who emigrated under the promise of Feijóo were treated like beasts during the year that his sad adventure lasted. They worked from sunup to sundown even when they were sick, they were hardly fed, they were locked up in barracks as if they were prisoners, they were beaten with whips to make them work harder and they barely saw a peseta. There were even traps used against those who complained, which Candia describes in her novel this way: “It’s like a mousetrap the size of a man. Two wooden boards with a hole for the head and two for the hands. The punishment is simple: stay there, with your head trapped and hanging, your body hunched over, feeling for hours that your blood stagnates and doesn’t circulate. Getting sores on his butt from not moving for days.” The sinister deputy had already warned of the possibility of business in one of his writings: «A Galician has to do the same work as two blacks for the price of a slave». The reality, however, was not so simple. The report made during the government investigation detailed that, of the 1,700 Galician passengers emigrated to work with Feijóo, 500 had died in October 1854. Slaves, harvesting sugar cane, in Cuba in the 19th century ABC Feijóo’s justifications “There are many deceased,” emphasizes Candia, whose novel is in its sixth edition and has sold more than 15,000 copies. Even so, I understand that there are almost no testimonies, because the survivors would be ashamed to tell that they had been deceived and what they had suffered. At that time it was a horrible shame to return to your land poor after having emigrated. Nobody would want to tell the tragedy to future generations. Feijóo justified himself in a thousand ways before the Cortes, but he knew that nothing could happen to him because he had parliamentary immunity. He went so far as to say that “Galician people were lazy and that they just wanted to eat, that you had to be tougher with them,” says the writer. He maintained that position, even when he escaped with the grant from the Cuban Development Board to Spain. The only consequence was that he had to close his company, because he did not even compensate the thousands of families who suffered his abuse. The Government decreed that if someone wanted to denounce him, he had to do it individually through the island’s arbitration system. MORE INFORMATION Noticias Si The truth behind the attack on Miguel Hernández for calling his fellow Republicans «whores» Noticias Si The strange ‘death ray’ that Mussolini created with Marconi so that Italy would win World War II «As you can imagine, no one did. Most did not even know how to read or write. This episode should teach us to look to the past to ask more questions about what our emigrant ancestors suffered. Those who fulfilled the great American dream of the Indian were 1%. Hardly anyone got rich. The emigration that Galicians and Spaniards in general experienced in the 19th and 20th centuries was a story of survival, not of enrichment. We must not forget that glory is often sustained by tragedies, “concludes Candia.

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