Introduction: the post-colonial church

The Church in Latin America after independence bore the marks of its Iberian and colonial past. From Spain Catholics inherited a tradition of strong faith, a basic doctrinal knowledge and an enduring piety. Observance itself was a medium of knowledge, for in the Mass, the Litanies and the Rosary the people learnt the doctrines, the scriptures, and the mysteries of the Catholic faith. Portugal too transmitted an orthodox Catholicism, but with less doctrinal knowledge and a lower degree of observance. Everywhere, religion in Latin America was a religion of the people, and the Church continued to receive the adherence and the respect of the Indians, mestizos and other popular sectors. Ruling groups were less committed, and the great fear of the Church in the nineteenth century was the apostasy of the elites, not the desertion of the masses. The Iberian tradition in religion favoured a privileged and a state-controlled Church. After independence, however, the wealth, influence and privileges of the Church were viewed by the new states as a rival focus of allegiance, an alternative power and a source of revenue. The threat of state control appeared in a new form. The Church had to look to its own resources and these in the early nineteenth century were diminishing.

Independence administered a great shock to the Church. To many it was the end of an epoch, the collapse of an entire world, the triumph of reason over faith. If Iberian power was broken, could the Catholic Church survive? Independence exposed the colonial roots of the Church and revealed its foreign origins. Independence also divided the Church. While some of the clergy were royalists, many were republicans, a few were insurgents, and most were influential in encouraging mass support for the new order once the last battle had been won.

In the 1860s, Cuba, the richest and most populated of Spain's two remaining American colonies, faced serious economic and political problems. The period of sustained growth, which beginning in the late eighteenth century had transformed the island into the world's foremost sugar producer, had begun to slow down during the previous decade. The production and export of sugar, the colony's staple product, continued to expand, but growing competition from European and American sugar beet and the development of new sugar-cane producing regions posed a threat to the future.

Since the 1840s, conscious of that threat, many alert hacendados (sugar-mill owners) began efforts to modernize (essentially to mechanize) the industry, while doubling their demands for reform of the archaic colonial commercial system. Spain economic weakness, and specifically her lack of sugar refineries and inability to absorb Cuba's sugar production, increasingly revealed Cuba's colonial dilemma: growing economic dependence on markets and technology which her mother country could not provide.

Furthermore, the future of slavery, for centuries an essential element in sugar production, had become bleak. The slave trade to Cuba had been declared illegal by treaties between Spain and Britain in 1817, but the trade managed to continue until 1835, when another treaty between the two nations and stricter vigilance on the part of the Spanish authorities forced it to decline yearly. By 1860 the infamous trade had virtually disappeared. During the 1840s and 1850s, some hacendados had placed their hopes for continued slavery on annexation by the United States, and had even helped to organize armed US expeditions to Cuba, but the victory of the North in the American civil war put an end to that particular brand of annexationist thought.

The 60 years between 1870 and 1930 which comprise the last two decades of the empire and the whole of the First Republic represent the apogee of export orientation in Brazilian economic history. Resources were shifted by government and the private sector to export production, and exports rose from £1.31 to £2.83 per capita from the decade of the 1870s to that of the 1920s, a gain of about 1.6 per cent a year. Much of the social transformation and economic diversification experienced during the period, including European immigration, urbanization, improvements in communications and transportation and a modest level of industrialization, clearly derived from the expansion of exports. This expansion was also the principal attraction of foreign capital. The level of British and United States investments rose from £53 million in 1880 to £385 million by 1929. The world depression of the 1930s brought this era to a close. Exports ceased to exercise a dynamic influence on the economy and autarky and import-substitution had to be increasingly employed thereafter to try to stimulate further growth.

Exports appear to have been the principal stimulus to the onset of per capita economic growth, which seems not to have begun until shortly before 1900. There is no certainty concerning the rate of that growth, since national accounts have only been kept since 1947. An average rate of per capita growth of gross domestic product of almost 2.5 per cent a year has been calculated for the period 1900 to 1929, but downward correction may be necessary.

Puerto Rican economy and society developed only slowly during the first three centuries of Spanish colonization. The island, whose precious metal deposits were exhausted by the middle of the sixteenth century, was not very attractive to colonizers. It was used mainly as a military bastion for the defence of Spanish vessels en route from Spain to the Spanish American mainland, and as a port where some of these ships could stock up with fresh water supplies. Apart from Spanish soldiers and officials in San Juan, the island was mainly settled by deserters and runaway slaves who had managed to escape from the plantations on the neighbouring islands, and by some soldiers who, having completed their military service, decided to establish themselves in the country as independent farmers. Local production was fundamentally for family subsistence.

It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that Spain began to concern itself with making Puerto Rico a productive colony rather than one dependent on external financial support. This concern became a vital necessity with the disintegration of the Empire at the beginning of the nineteenth century. A large number of Spanish families from the newly independent mainland colonies, as well as French families from Louisiana and Haiti, began to arrive on the island. The Spanish government gave them land and facilities to start cultivation for export and it did away with some impediments to trade which had been imposed on the island in favour of merchants from Seville and Cadiz.

At the end of the 1870s, few Argentines would have imagined that they were on the verge of a prodigious process of social transformation. Little had happened in the 1870s to make anyone expect that the dreams of progress of the politicians active during the ‘National Organization’ period (1852–62) would be realized. On the contrary, during the presidencies of Domingo F. Sarmiento (1868-74) and Nicolas Avellaneda (1874-80) economic and social progress, though significant, had been slow and laborious. Of the factors which subsequently contributed to Argentina's rapid economic growth, some had not yet appeared and others were only beginning to emerge. Livestock was still of poor quality; the country imported wheat; only a small part of Argentine territory was covered by the transport network; banking services were still in the rudimentary state; and the influx of capital and immigrants was small. Even this hesitant progress had been interrupted by the severe economic crisis of 1874–7. It is not surprising, therefore, that some people had begun to doubt that the progress of the country could be based on the fertility of the pampas, as had always been imagined. Among clear indications of this incipient attitude were the various studies at the time directed towards determining the location of mineral resources, and the ‘protectionist’ ideology that emerged in the parliamentary debates of 1876.

The first national census of 1869 had provided clear evidence of widespread backwardness in Argentina. That vast area had a population of under 1.8 million, a density of 0.43 inhabitants per square kilometre. Poverty was reflected in the low quality of housing: 78.6 per cent of Argentines lived in miserable ranchos of mud and straw.

Introduction

The European or North American who visited Latin America in the years before 1870 invariably came away struck by the diversity of the area – in geography, in people, in environment. Cities there were. Indeed cities had played a dominant role in the development of Spanish America at least, even when they contained only a small percentage of the area's total population. But generally they appeared small, poor and broken down. Far more impressive was the countryside of Latin America – the imposing Andean mountains, the vast Amazonian jungle, the endless grasslands of the llanos or the pampas, the picturesque Indian hamlets, the enormous landed estates. Consequently it was rural Latin America that most vividly emerged from the travel accounts, letters and dispatches of the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, a bird's eye view of the Latin American city in 1870 will set the stage for the dramatic changes that the ensuing decades brought to the area's urban landscape.

Even the largest Latin American cities appeared small, in large measure because of their plaza-orientation. Both the residences of the wealthy and the powerful and the principal urban activities of administration, services and trade were concentrated around the central plaza. Rio de Janeiro, Havana, Mexico City and Buenos Aires all had central districts of only a few hundred blocks. These areas, often extending no more than five or ten blocks from the main plaza, had the appearance of an urbanized zone: substantial housing, paving, sidewalks and street lights. Located in this central district were markets, offices, stores, clubs, theatres, churches and schools to serve the elite.

The proclamation of the independent Dominican Republic on 27 February 1844 crowned the efforts of LM Trinitaria, a secret society founded for that purpose six years earlier when Santo Domingo, the eastern two-thirds of the island of Hispaniola, was still united with Haiti. It was the second time sovereignty had been proclaimed. The first, so-called ‘ephemeral’ independence (from Spain), brought about by Núñez de Cáceres in 1821, had only lasted a few months, after which the capital city's keys were handed to the president of Haiti. The new sovereignty lasted long enough – and had a sufficiently appealing legitimation, based as it was on antagonism to neighbouring Haiti – to make 27 February the national holiday on which the birth of the Republic is commemorated. Yet in the period up to 1930 sovereignty was again twice suspended. Before two decades of new-found independence had passed the country had re-annexed itself to Spain, and remained under Spanish control for four years (1861–5); from 1916–24 it was under military occupation by the United States. In the remainder of the period, numerous plans were made to give up sovereignty in exchange for foreign protection. Seen in this light, the country's independence remained, if not ephemeral, at least tenuous. The passage from reannexation by Spain to occupation by the United States shows the direction in which the external forces, to which the Republic was subjected, changed. From a country still embedded in a European, quasicolonial network, it had become, by the end of the nineteenth century, a client-state of the United States.