Catch Me If You Can: Francisco de Miranda, Spanish Authorities, and the Art of Deception

Donning the uniform of a Spanish colonel, the Conde de Miranda conquered the admiration of Catherine the Great’s favorite, Prince Grigory Potemkin, in 1787. Baffled, Spanish diplomats in Russia could not believe that Francisco de Miranda (1750–1816), a title-less native of Caracas who had been dismissed from the Spanish army, could deceive Saint Petersburg’s top courtesans so easily. The documents reveal a Spanish crown only willing to ask its diplomatic corps to observe and report on “dangerous” Miranda.

This paper examines two moments in Francisco de Miranda’s life from the point of view of the Spanish state. After a brief discussion of his Russian sojourn, we travel back in time and leave the frozen steppes to enter the humid, hot road between Havanna and the Anchorage of Batabanó in 1781. There, Spanish treasury officials captured a large load of merchandise brought from Jamaica to Cuba by the then Lieutenant General Miranda. This episode marks the beginning of Miranda’s disgrace with Spanish authorities as he was accused of being a smuggler. It also launches his new life as an adventurer, revolutionary, and precursor of Latin American independence. In my analysis, I contrast traditional accounts of the Batabanó affair, based mostly on Miranda’s own Colombeia archive, to the ordinary judicial case housed in Madrid’s Archivo Histórico Nacional. Multiple eyewitnesses, from the involved treasury officials to enslaved Africans, tell a simpler story of contraband, devoid of the veneer of Spanish greed, jealousy, and injustice found in the Miranda archive. In all, my work explores how Spanish authorities dealt with deceptive individuals in the second half of the eighteenth century to generate a larger reflection on state capacity vis-a-vis individual self-fashioning.