Velázquez desired to finish the conquering of Cuba a decade later and it is on this occasion that the sentiment of Indians is first heard. Hatuey, a native chieftain, had witnessed the destruction of his people on the neighboring island of Española (present day Haiti and Dominican Republic) and came to lead a resistance in Cuba. Hatuey said of the Spaniards, "They are a very wicked and cruel people... these Europeans worship a very covetous sort of God, so that it is difficult to satisfy him; to perform the worship they render to this idol, they will exact immense treasures from us, and will... reduce us to a miserable state of slavery, or else put us to death." Then, holding up a basket of treasures, he declared, "This is their Lord. This is what they serve. This is what they are after."4 He and his four hundred countrymen were, of course, no match for the "ray which wounds us from a point our arrows cannot reach." When Hatuey was later arrested to be burned at the stake, it was a Catholic priest who encouraged him to accept Christianity and be baptized. He refused. Only in this way, the priest argued, could he be assured of a place in heaven. Hatuey responded famously:

"And to heaven the Christians also go?"

"Yes, they go to heaven if they are good and die in the grace of God."

"If the Christians go to heaven, I do not want to go to heaven. I do not wish ever again to meet such cruel and wicked people as Christians who kill and make slaves of the Indians."5

King Ferdinand ordered that all others who resisted should be enslaved and branded on the forehead. There is a saying about this type of practice: España conquistó America a christazos, which roughly translates "Spain conquered the Americas with blows of the cross."6 Obviously, the ideals of peaceful evangelism and conversion in the New World were never a real consideration. Religious absolutism dominated the scene and ruined any opportunity for legitimate religious work, but that was not really the goal, though advertised. Ferdinand even thanked Velázquez for his humane treatment of the natives. Consider the paradox. Hatuey, the pagan, sounded almost biblically prophetic while the Spaniards, the Christians, killed and sold people into slavery.

Three factors in Spain contributed directly to this state of affairs. First, the fresh sores from battles with Mohammedans drove the Catholic world to find (or create) allies. Second, the Spanish Inquisition, then in full effect, weighed heavily when determining the methodology for the conversions. Lastly, Spain always needed finances to support its many initiatives. Even Las Casas (1474-1566), a Dominican monk and perhaps the only missionary of note in early sixteenth-century Cuba, was overwhelmed in his naïve efforts to protect Indians and was relegated to the role of biographer and historiographer. His efforts are to be thanked for much of what we do know about the real situation in the Caribbean. Such was the story of early Christian missions in Cuba, and the situation changed little for the next three hundred fifty years, except to worsen.

Latin American scholar Jaime Suchlicki estimates that there were 60,000 Cubans at the time of Columbus's landing, although others guess as low as 16,000 or as high as 600,000.7 Louis A. Pérez, a noted scholar and a Cuban, says there were 112,000 native Cubans initially. That number was 19,000 as early as 1519, 7,000 by 1531, and fewer than 3,000 Indians twenty years later.8 We will not discuss the horrifying practices employed by the Spanish that contributed so dramatically to the demise of the Indian people or the harm it did to the mission of the church, but suffice it to say that due to Spanish aggression, disease, displacement, and the shock of occupation and suicide, the indigenous population of Cuba was virtually annihilated a short sixty years after the first Europeans arrived.9 This leads us to the second highly formative fact of Cuban and church history: slavery.

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