It continues to be a taboo subject in Spain and in relations with the American countries, its former colonies.
The Spanish crown had a strong participation in the trade of slaves sent from Africa to the American territories, but that role has not yet been officially recognized by the Iberian country.
José Antonio Piqueras (Enguera, 69 years old), professor of History at the Universitat Jaume I, has delved into that shameful past and has published several books on slavery and the implications it had on both sides of the Atlantic.
The most recent of them is
Antislavery in Spain
(Catarata), in which he analyzes how slavery prospered in the Spanish colonies, where between 2.3 and 2.5 million people were transferred from African territories, more than 800,000 of them to Cuba and Puerto Rico.
The benefits of this exploitation allowed the formation of large capital and investments in the Peninsula, the creation of companies that are now very solid and even the construction of neighborhoods such as Chamberí, in Madrid, promoted by Cubans enriched by the sugar plantations, where the labor was slave.
Piqueras, who is staying as a visiting professor at the Colegio de México, analyzes in this interview that slave past and the consequences it still has in Latin America.
Ask.
Much is known about the slavery practiced by England, France or Portugal, but little is known about what Spain did.
What role did the Spanish crown play in this human trade?
Answer.
The Spanish crown, in this case of Castile, is the first to establish, together with the Portuguese, a regulation that considers slavery a royal privilege, that is, a source of income for the royal treasury.
It is a monopoly that the crown has and that it grants to those people who it considers deserve it or who are going to make loans to it.
Q.
Who could access these concessions?
A.
Initially the aristocrats, the military or the great merchants.
They have what are called licenses and they were granted throughout the 16th century.
From the first moment a transport entry fee is established and a real fee must be paid to ensure that there is no smuggling.
The slaves are branded with fire, with a hot iron, and in this way there is proof that they have passed through customs legally.
Q.
How did these concessions work?
A.
There are trading houses that provided the capital for interest and since the 16th century there are other trading houses that specialize in maritime insurance, which includes human cargo, insuring the lives of slaves.
There is also a distorted image that we have: we think that in Africa what there was was a hunt for human beings, and that could have happened at some point, but when the business was established, very early in the 15th century, the Portuguese, and Then everyone else, what they get is a transaction.
That is to say, there is an exchange of human beings for merchandise that can be fabrics, rum, firearms and gunpowder.
Q.
Who traded with slaves in Africa?
A.
There are African kings, or African chiefs, who asked for certain things in exchange for delivering slaves.
Q.
A few months ago the British newspaper
The Guardian
apologized for the relationship that its original owners had with slavery.
How was the relationship of Spanish businessmen with this issue?
A.
There is a denial when it comes to establishing an implication, but of the 12.5 or 13 million slaves that could have been transported from Africa to America, we estimate that around 2.3 or 2.5 million people were taken. to Spanish America, either directly or to deposits in the Dutch, British or French colonies in the Caribbean.
This is a very high number and is estimated to represent between 19% and 20% of all American slavery.
What we see, then, is a general denialism of what the phenomenon of the Spanish empire in America is and the uses it made of the people here, from the indigenous population to the African population.
Q.
It was cheap labor for the plantations.
A.
The boom in plantation crops is a very late phenomenon in the Spanish Caribbean, which in the 19th century was basically limited to Cuba and Puerto Rico.
In those countries, slavery is dissolved until very late and there is a very high level of complicity, because on an island [Cuba] that did not have a million inhabitants, bringing in 600,000 slaves over 40 years can only be done through a system of systematic corruption of the authorities.
A system is established that consumes human resources, destroys them and only replaces them through new imports, because since the majority are men who work on the plantations, there is no biological possibility of reproduction.
Q.
Who controlled these large plantations?
A.
There are second and third generation Spaniards, that is, Creoles, and there are Spaniards who have arrived as merchants, who have dedicated themselves to clandestine trafficking and then invest in large sugar plantations.
It is a highly technical process and European machinery powered by steam is used and slaves are employed in the fields because they have to supply cane to all this factory production.
It is a process that generates great benefits.
Q.
They got rid of the cost of paying labor.
A.
Yes, and the profits obtained in all this are transferred to buy industrial shares in England, to invest in banks and, in a percentage, are sent to Spain.
And it is a silenced topic in Spain because it was clandestine, illegal, but in part it was used to modernize Spanish industry, finance and railways.
The first Spanish railway was paid for entirely with the money of a former slave owner who had emigrated to Cuba, made a fortune, returned and wanted there to be a railway in his town.
Q.
Are there large capitals in Spain whose basis is slavery?
A.
Yes. They were merchants who were involved in many businesses, including the slave trade.
There is, for example, the Ibarra family, who later founded Banco Bilbao and Banco Vizcaya [predecessors of the current BBVA].
We have correspondence in which they say 'we have participated in this business and how well it has turned out, I want to repeat it', because they had never earned so much with a single operation, which is taking slaves from Africa to Cuba.
Then there are those who founded the Grandes Hornos de Vizcaya, newspapers like El Correo, which is the core of the Vocento Editorial Group.
There are also cement, machinery, and construction companies.
Q.
An entire industrial boom thanks to slavery.
A.
We find it in many sectors such as the urban reform of cities like Madrid or Barcelona, entire neighborhoods, like Chamberí, which was built by several Cubans enriched by trafficking, who continued to maintain plantations in Cuba and invested their money in Spain. .
The ancestors of the great writer Luis Goytisolo had large plantations in Cuba and his family lived off the income from these plantations for several generations.
We have people who are dedicated to fashion, like Ágatha Ruiz de la Prada, an aristocrat, whose family made their fortune in the same way.
There is the Güell family, which is one of the most important in Barcelona and patrons of Gaudí, who support modernism as an architectural style.
They are new rich who want the most modern.
There are the López De la Madrids, who are founders of the Tusquets publishing house.
We find them everywhere, in politics, in the legal profession, in a very significant name: Rodrigo Rato, who was vice president of the Spanish Government but above all managing director of the International Monetary Fund.
His family spent 150 years in the legal and then illegal transatlantic slave trade business.
Q.
Should Spain formally recognize its participation in the slave trade?
A.
It would be a good exercise, because countries need to reconcile with their past and also with the societies that are descendants of that situation.
It is an act that starts from recognition and then raises another question that usually scares, which is reparation, because there is no justice if it is not restorative justice.
Q.
Can there be repair so long later?
A.
Yes, but in a different way.
Sometimes we understand reparation as financial compensation, but there are different ways of doing it.
In the United States and Great Britain, for example, there are universities that have recognized that they were able to get ahead because they received money from plantations and have generated funds to help with scholarships for people of African descent.
And they have also allocated funds to study this phenomenon, because it must be noted that this past was a source of stereotypes that today contribute to discrimination.
Q.
Is slavery in the Caribbean the basis of the inequality we now see in those countries?
A.
Partly yes.
The studies carried out today take into account the inequality of ethnic origin.
I recently gave a lecture at the UNAM and I said that it was the most insidious inequality, because while it is true that in general any origin marks, there is one that costs much more to erase, even with personal effort, because you will continue to be racialized and, Therefore, you will not have the same opportunities later.
Q.
Should Spain ask for forgiveness?
A.
That is a symbolic element that costs a lot.
I think it is not only asking for forgiveness, but taking a more effective step, which is recognizing that a conquest or a colonization or an extraction of wealth involved suffering with victims who had no alternative.
In addition, there were beneficiaries and states, empires and even artistic expressions were created on that basis.
The splendor of the Spanish golden age of the El Prado museum, for example, is paid for with the gold and silver that arrives from America.
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