La politique de concession de titres de Castille et de grandesses d’Espagne à La Havane entre 1759 et 1833

• Main Author: Dominique Gonçalves
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Université Paris 3 2009-09-01
• Series: Cahiers des Amériques Latines
• Subjects: elites; aristocracy; independence
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/cal/2149

After losing Havana to the British in 1762 and recovering her from them a year later thanks to the Treaty of Paris, the Spanish Crown began to transform the city into an inexpugnable bastion, trusting a significant part of her defense to the well-settled Creole elites. This political gamble was compensated by the distribution of nobility titles and “grandezas” of Spain to a extent never seen before. By doing this, the Spanish Crown aimed to consolidate the loyalty of the Creole elites, since an aristocracy has a sense of existence only in relation to a Monarchy. From Charles the Third to Ferdinand the Sixth, Spanish kings consolidated a Creole society in Cuba that became a Spanish stronghold in the Americas, one of the reasons that could help to explain the absence of an independentist movement in Cuba at the beginning of the nineteenth-century. On the other hand, these concessions of Royal prerogatives also shows how the Creole elites were capable of influencing the decisions of the monarchs, making clear their association with the construction of their own identity. All this suggests that the “elites- Monarchy” relationship did not only work in a vertical way.