A Cuban Convent in the Age of Enlightened Reform: The Observant Franciscan Community of Santa Clara of Havana, 1768-1808

In 1807 the Commissary General of the Indies for the Franciscan Order, ¹ Pablo de Moya, appealed to the Spanish crown to lift a long-standing ban on the admission of novices at the Observant Franciscan community of Our Lady of Santa Clara (Nuestra Señora de Santa Clara) of Havana. Moya reported that the great majority of the clarisas had grown aged and infirm in recent years. ² The sad situation on which the commissary general reported was the result of four decades of convent reform at Santa Clara that successfully reestablished the common life (vida común), something seldom achieved in the large, opulent convents of the Spanish empire. ³

In recent decades, with increased interest in social history, scholars have focused on the social and economic aspects of female religious life in the Spanish colonial empire. Their focus, however, has been the religious communities of the mainland. ⁴ Few scholars have turned their attention to the female communities of the Caribbean, a region often viewed as peripheral to events. ⁵ Yet, in the late eighteenth century Cuba was very much at the center of events in the Spanish empire.

Convent reform was an aspect of the Bourbon reforms of the late-eighteenth century. In 1762, three years after Charles III (1759-1788) ascended to the Spanish throne, the fragility of the empire he inherited from his half-brother, Ferdinand VI (1746-1759), became clear when the British captured Havana in 1762 during the Seven Years War. In the aftermath of the debacle, ministers in the court of Charles III embraced enlightened ideas with regard to military organization, trade policy, public administration and the role of the nobility and the Catholic Church. These enlightened ministers set out to reform and rejuvenate the empire and to make the king's power more absolute. They began their efforts in Cuba, where reforms worked much as they were intended, producing an organized, disciplined militia and a booming economy. Such reforms allowed the Spanish to defeat the British in West Florida during the War of American Independence (1776-1783), while commercial reforms positioned Cubans to take advantage of opportunities in the sugar trade that arose in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution (1791). ⁶

Like most of the reforms, Bourbon efforts to redefine the role of the Catholic Church in Cuba and elsewhere met with staunch opposition from various groups. The Jesuits, prior to their expulsion from all Spanish dominions in 1767, were the most obstinate. ⁷ Reports reaching Madrid before and after the Jesuit expulsion called attention to relaxed discipline among the male and female orders of the empire. ⁸ Female orders, for the most part, were guilty of lesser transgressions than their male counterparts. Among the most serious and persistent charges against the chaste nuns was that they failed to observe the common life in the large, opulent convents (conventos grandes) of the empire. The consequences of private life were social and spiritual in that private incomes, semi-private lifestyles and personal servants (criadas particulares) ⁹ eroded the communal, egalitarian spirit of the cloister and corrupted the contemplative life. To the enlightened reformers, however, the consequences extended beyond the social and the spiritual to the economic and, thereby, to the imperial. Private life was a practice by which the idle religious unnecessarily burdened their parents or benefactors, siphoning off resources that otherwise might have gone into productive enterprise. ¹⁰ The history of the clarisas of Havana between 1768 and 1811 is a good example of the success of Bourbon convent reform.

In the late eighteenth century the clarisas of Santa Clara (founded in 1644) comprised one of three female religious communities in Havana. The other two were the Recollect Dominicans, or catalinas, of Santa...