Missionaries and Moralization for the Franciscan Province of Santa Elena: The Dilemma of an Exported Reform

The exact date on which the first Franciscan friars arrived in Cuba remains unknown, but it was certainly during an early phase of the conquest.¹ Regardless of the exact moment in which the friars disembarked on the island, it is important to note that it marked the beginning of a long history, a history almost condemned to obscurity and from time to time the object of harsh criticism and impassioned indulgence, and more often recorded through partial constructions than through investigation and reasoning. Perhaps because of the complexity of its peculiarities and/or for certain socio-political determining factors that will not be analyzed at this time, Cuba has been one of the marginalized territories of the American ecclesiastical historiography. Nevertheless, in recent years, interest in ecclesiastical themes has grown incrementally among some scholars who, striving to fill the voids, have opened new lines of research and venture to investigate the older documents of the archive.²

Through the study of a specific period of Franciscan presence on the island, we can identify some of the elements that intervened in the complex process of the promotion and breach of relations between the religious orders and Cuban colonial society. The events that overwhelmed the order of Saint Francis toward the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries reveal the most hidden aspects of everyday life in the convents and are surprising in their indiscreet revelations and inflammatory and metaphorical commentary. These commentaries decipher the feelings, nested in individuals, which overwhelmed and divided the religious community and revealed its contradictions toward the end of the century, mocking the walls of the cloisters and rendering them more permeable each time.

From the beginning, the laws of the Papacy favored the regular clergy, especially the Franciscan order. In the 1535, 1539, and 1544 Briefs of Paul III, religious orders were charged with opening a road independent of the secular ecclesiastical hierarchy in the campaign of evangelization. From that time, and through the colonial period, the procedure for the recruitment for and organization of the American missions remained practically unchanged. According to the established plan, the leaders of the order requested the recruitment from the crown and, once this was approved, appointed the friars. For his part the King, by virtue of the authority granted him by the royal patronage, took charge of determining the quantity and distribution of the missionaries, also holding the right to exclude those he did not consider worthy.³

In 1609, the chapter of the Franciscan order, held in Toledo, created the custodia of Santa Elena which included the convents of Cuba and missions of Florida. Prior to this date, the convents of Santiago de Cuba (1531) and Bayamo (1582) were under the jurisdiction of the province of Santo Domingo and the convent of Havana (1576)—after being run directly by the Comisario General de las Indias were incorporated into the Yucatan and later the Santo Evangelio de México. Three years later, during the chapter meeting in Rome, the custodia of Santa Elena was elevated to the category of province. After 1763, the Floridian territories passed to English hands and the province of Santa Elena was left with no other convents save for those on the island.⁴

With its leadership located at the convent of the Purísima Concepción de La Habana beginning in 1612, the Franciscan order extended its conventual network in Cuba and encouraged the incorporation of young Creoles into its cloisters. The Franciscans grew in number, surpassing the remainder of the religious orders established on the island, and exploded in the nineteenth century with a total of nine foundations: one convent and one hospice in Havana and seven houses in Guanabacoa, Villa Clara, Trinidad, Sacti Spíritus, Puerto Príncipe, Bayamo, and Santiago de Cuba. Despite...