Vasco Porcallo de Figueroa: Ambition and Individualism in the Early Spanish Caribbean

Vasco Porcallo de Figueroa was a dominant figure in early Cuba who long outlasted other prominent men on the island and built up a large and thriving estate with hundreds of Indian and African slaves and servants at a time that many enterprises were failing. Said to have been Cuban governor Diego Velásquez’s choice to lead the expedition to Mexico that was ultimately assigned to Hernando Cortés, Porcallo preferred to amass socioeconomic rather than political power, holding local offices and sway over his private domain in Cuba but apparently not interested in higher positions of authority. Brutal, shrewd, status conscious, and an adept survivor, he pursued a long and varied career that took him to Mexico, where he received an encomienda, and briefly to Florida with Hernando de Soto, whom he abruptly abandoned to return to Cuba. His historical reputation is contradictory, notwithstanding a fairly extensive documentary record and references to him in sixteenth-century chronicles. He was a virtual warlord, leading his entourage of relatives, retainers, and servants against indigenous uprisings and even other Spaniards, resulting in an inquiry by the high court in Santo Domingo. Yet he proved impervious to official censorship and successfully cultivated his ties with important people while consistently exercising his penchant for independence and personal advancement. He probably never married but had numerous children with indigenous women. Vasco Porcallo thus embodied many of the paradoxes of early Spaniards in the islands, demonstrating extreme cruelty toward the indigenous inhabitants while using them as the basis for his enterprises and growing household, gaining the trust of leaders but repudiating the responsibilities they expected from a man of his stature to undertake, and remaining in Cuba where, despite economic decline, he lived out his seigneurial ambitions.