Free Light Action in the Caribbean by Barry Lopez Page B

came in the seventh generation. (By great wealth I mean a perennial wealth, an aggregation of investment, credit, and land that cannot be depleted at that point by scandal, squandering of opportunity, ordinary prodigality, or even criminal activity.) I am no mathematician; but, noting that this wealth does inexplicably begin to dissipate in the eighth generation and that by the ninth or tenth generation, it is on a par with that, respectively, of the fifth and fourth generations, a formula is present here seemingly worth divining.
    7. A relative term, which benefits from the clarification offered in Carlson Kildfray’s
Subterranean Economics
. Kildfray has, of course, been heavily criticized for his putative insensitivity to human plight; but I believe he comes closer in his work to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century economic reality in the Spanish Caribbean than any other economic historian. The fact is that Taino, Ciboney, Cuna, Island Carib, Mosquito, and other indigenes were at a primary level of social and economic organization, but this was not their fault. It was necessary that they be brought along quickly with the development of New World wealth; and it was inevitable in such a process that some individuals would be treated roughly. In
El florecimiento de la economía política occidental
by Juan Ramón Aruba and Kasumasa Asahi’s
Dotchakuteki keizai chitsujo no jokyo
(The elimination of indigenous economic boundaries), such provocative concepts as “ordained wealth,” “penetration economics,” and “disparity compassion” are subjected to stunning exegeses.
    The storm-tossed subject of the exercise of economic and political control in previously occupied New World territories having been addressed, the further question of authority in these newlands vis-à-vis the desires of competing colonial family groups arises; and here, certainly, we have some dark chapters before us. For a discussion of criminal subterfuge among the ruling classes in the Spanish Caribbean, see
Politika potrebleniia i politicheskii konflikt v Kube xvii veka
(Consummation policies and political conflict in seventeenth-century Cuba) by Maldano Pestrovich. For a frank discussion of extortion and murder among the same, see “The Tenebrous Light of Grief: The Economy of Santo Domingo and Cuba in the Sixteenth Century” by Beverly Weissbaum in
International Journal of Colonial Theory
62, no. 2 (1986): 1245–91.
    Alternative views of indigenous land rights, and the legal and moral implications arising therefrom, are ably set out in Malcolm Batson’s
A Woeful Tide
and
Créatures de la lune
by Rebecca Tide Assiminy.
    8. Although a strong home market for tobacco developed almost immediately after colonization by the Spanish, the cultivation of tobacco in Cuba did not begin until 1580, according to Demster Poltcaza in his authoritative
Tobacco: Its Origin and Production
. Bernardo Marín, however, in a letter to his father dated 15 May 1545 (BMLS 3.4506), states that he seeded his first crop of
Nicotiana tabacum
in the spring of that year. As nearly as I can determine, he was the first to export Cuban tobacco, probably by 1548.
    In another letter to his father, dated 22 August 1548 (BMLS 3.4811), Marín sets forth the reasons for planting this crop and speculates about his success. He makes reference to several precipitating dreams and, of course, to the vagaries of Spanish colonial shipping. The most astonishing line in this letter is his contention that “the proceeds [from the tobacco crop] will ensure the wealth of my descendants in these wretched and primitive lands to the seventh generation.”
    The contributions of his descendants to the development of tobacco varieties are substantial (cf.
Tobacco Leaf: Its Culture and
Cure
by T. E. Roberson, pp. 257–61); and the fame of the family’s cigar leaf, unsurpassed for aroma, was widespread by the end of the seventeenth century. Oddly, Marín himself did not smoke. As well as I can