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1. Bolívar in Haiti: Republicanism in the Revolutionary Atlantic
- University Press of Mississippi
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25 1 Bolívar in Haiti: Republicanism in the Revolutionary Atlantic —Sibylle Fischer 1816, Republic of Haiti. After the collapse of the First Republic in Venezuela in 1812 and the brutal reprisals that followed, Spanish American patriots had been arriving daily, by the boatload, in Haiti. Many had first sought refuge on the nearby islands of Curaçao, Trinidad, and St. Thomas, but eventually most of the refugees ended up in the coastal towns of Jacmel , Jérémie, and Les Cayes in southern Haiti. In 1815 the fall of Cartagena set off another wave of refugees, with over six hundred Granadans taking to the sea. Under attack from royalist forces and ill equipped for the rough journey by sea, only four hundred of them ever seem to have made it to a safe haven. For most, this haven was Haiti. By early 1816, about two thousand residents from Venezuela and Nueva Granada were living in various Haitian towns on the southern peninsula and in Port-au-Prince.1 Facing the Caribbean Sea, the southern coast of Haiti had always had close connections to neighboring islands and the coastal towns of the mainland. Privateers and smugglers used Les Cayes as a base of operations . A sizable community of foreign merchants had settled in Haiti’s southern towns and left behind some remarkable accounts of their experiences , which often stress the urbanity and hospitality of the place (Verna, Pétion y Bolívar, 157–60). Among the Spanish American patriots who lived in Haiti were some of the important generals and caudillos of the early years of the military struggle against Spain, among them Carlos Soublette, José Padilla, Manuel Piar, Santiago Mariño, and José Francisco Bermúdez. Little is known about the early years of exile for Venezuelan patriots. Fortunately the record becomes thicker with the arrival of Simón Bolívar in December 1815. The president of the Haitian republic, Alexandre Pétion, a man of color and veteran of the revolutionary wars in Saint-Domingue, welcomed Bolívar and the group of insurgents who accompanied him, and directed the governor of the southern province to provide the refugees Sibylle Fischer 26 with rations of bread and salt fish. When Bolívar prepared his first invasion of the Venezuelan mainland from Les Cayes in March 1816, he did so with the funds and military support of the Haitian state. The invasion failed, and by August 1816 Bolívar was back in Haiti. In December he set sail again, this time from Jacmel, for a second, more successful attempt to retake Venezuela from the royalist forces. Did some Granadan and Venezuelan families stay behind? How long did they live in Haiti? Did they ever leave, or did they eventually mix with the local population? In her memoir about the famous Jacmelian Carnival, the Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat reminds us of a description we owe to the Haitian novelist René Depestre of men wearing multicolored “Bolívar hats” with bright feathers and long locks of hair. Danticat also points out that Jacmel’s main street is to this day called Rue Barranquilla , after the Colombian harbor town. Why Barranquilla? Was the street named after Granadans who had settled there? Perhaps a nostalgic gesture by those who stayed behind? At least for a few years, Haiti was, it seems, a rather cosmopolitan place, with its southern coast figuring as a gathering point for populations that were swept up in the insurgencies on the mainland and were not welcomed by the colonial governments of the other Caribbean islands.2 I suspect that this picture of a cosmopolitan Haiti with close ties to revolutionary movements in the Atlantic will come as a surprise to many readers. According to most accounts, Haiti was an island cut off from its surroundings through diplomatic embargoes, a pariah in the hemisphere, set on its own eccentric loop. Did Haiti not represent all that white Creoles feared—a state that had grown out of race war, that was now run by former slaves and their allies, a state where whites, despite promises to the contrary, had been brutally massacred even after the end of warfare? Why did the Venezuelan and Granadan patriots and their families, most of them white Creoles, go to Haiti, of all places? I think that the situation on the ground in the early years of the new Haitian republic may have been more complicated than many historical and contemporary accounts let on, and we...