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19 Up in Arms Taíno Freedom Fighters in Higüey and Boriquén This and the next section focus on two “Spanish-Taíno” battlefronts and their aftermath: the religious persecution and the destruction of native cemí idols. The scenario of the first two battles was the Higüey region in Hispaniola, a territory that was also designated as Caiçimú (literally, the “nose” or “beginning” of the land), in eastern Hispaniola (Figure 31). Sued Badillo (2003:264), citing the early chronicler Pedro Mártir de Anglería, noted that this land was governed by powerful caciques, including Cayacoa and, after his death, his wife, Inés de Cayacoa, and Cotubanamá. In another publication Sued Badillo (2001b:31), following Las Casas , highlights Iguanamá as the paramount chieftess of Higüey. The other battlefront opened up a few years later (at the end of 1510) in Puerto Rico, where cacique Agüeybana II led the Rebellion of the Caciques of Boriquén. From these events valuable insights can be gained about the inter-insular network of relationships between caciques. While the first battles grew as direct responses to the Spanish aggression (see Oliver 2008a; Varela and Gil 2008), they also suggest that the strategies of native warfare used were not all new but more likely were based on prior warfare experience and military traditions from pre-Hispanic times. From these conflicts one learns about the relationships between caciques of Higüey and Puerto Rico and, as well, of the role and function that cemí idols played, or might have played, during these crises of war. The inferences to be made about the role of the cemís (as idols and as spirits) are, of course, predicated on accepting the arguments I have provided thus far on the personhood and identity of these objects, on the relationships of power they had with human caciques, and on how and why these (along with women giving and taking and name exchanges) circulated and changed hands to cement alliances and to front rival caciques and, of course, the Spaniards. This is not a story about the “good” Taínos against the “evil” Spaniards. Native chiefs plotted with the Spanish to defeat their sworn cacique enemies; not all Spaniards were bent on the enslaving and murderous policies of the colonial elite. A minority were against such abuses against the natives, such as Friar Antón de Montesinos ’s and Bishop Las Casas’s public indictments (see Fernández Buey 1995), or the initial noble, but failed, attempt by the Hieronymite order (1517–1519) to avert the ultimate decimation of the natives left in Hispaniola (Moya Pons 1987:141– 162). In the balance, though, the Spanish colonial and exploitative policies, aided 192 Chapter 19 by famine and pandemics like smallpox, led to the utter collapse of the natives’ way of life (Varela 2006; Varela and Gil 2008). Although their extermination was not total everywhere, there is no doubt that the human cost was huge; hundreds of thousands of Caribbean natives died or fled their homelands. No reliable demographic figures exist for the genocide. But in one estimate the native population in Hispaniola was around 3.77 million inhabitants in 1492 (Moya Pons 1987:181– 189). In five years some 72,600 natives were killed, a ratio of 145 natives killed for every Spaniard (of a total population of approximately 500) present in Hispaniola before the Ovando governorship. By 1510 the native population had declined to about 33,500 (Moya Pons 1987:187), and in the census for the repartimiento (distribution) of Indians taken by Alburquerque in 1514 (Moya Pons 1987:105passim ), 26,344 souls were left to count, although this figure probably excluded the alzados, or runaway, itinerant groups in the remote corners of Hispaniola. Still, such a death toll is roughly on the order of 3.4 million, or 86 percent of the native population, within just a dozen years—and it does not yet include the devastating effects of the smallpox pandemic that spread five years later throughout Hispaniola , in January 1519 (Moya Pons 1987:161). Because the Spanish records are incomplete , Puerto Rican native demography is essentially unknowable, but again there is no doubt that the cost in native life was also very high (Anderson-Córdova 1990, 2005; Sued Badillo 2000). This is not to argue that Taínos and other native peoples in some areas of Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere did not survive into the late seventeenth and even...

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