Imperial Affirmative Action: Royalist Emigres in Early Nineteenth-Century Cuba

This paper analyzes a critical administrative and financial dilemma faced by the Spanish Crown as its empire contracted in the nineteenth century and its far-flung bureaucrats converged upon the peninsula, the Caribbean and, to a lesser extent, the Philippines. During the heady early days of resistance to the French invasion and rebellions in the Americas, the Cortes promised royalist émigrés a generous pension during the period of their displacement from office. This order was later confirmed by Ferdinand VII, who paid officials half their salary confident that his reconquest of insurgent territories would soon allow them to return to their posts. By the1820s, whether the king could admit it or not, the refugees who had flooded into Cuba had little hope of regaining their prior employment and were weary of trying to subsist on half salaries. Therefore, émigrés applied for any government position that opened in Cuba, arguing that they deserved special treatment based upon all they had lost in return for their loyal service: property, livelihoods, and in some cases even families. Initially the crown was inclined to show such favoritism; by employing the refugees, the king both rewarded loyalism and saved money by ceasing to pay their pensions. It did not take long for native Cubans to react. They agreed that émigrés deserved pensions, but identified them as transient foreigners. Moreover, Cubans highlighted their own notable loyalism to Spain and lamented that if émigrés were always favored, the natives would never get positions in their own local government.