Rain and wind on the morning of May 9, 1799, prevented Nicolás Calvo from making the journey back to Havana from his sugar estate, the Nueva Holanda. What might have been an uneventful morning was interrupted by the arrival of a stranger, dressed in uniform, wet and muddy from a long journey across bad roads in a downpour. The man was Salvador José de Muro y Salazar, the Marqués de Someruelos, on his way to the capital to assume his new post: governor of Havana and captain-general of the island of Cuba.

It is fitting that the new governor’s welcome to the island consisted of an extended visit with Nicolás Calvo at Nueva Holanda. Calvo was one of Cuba’s richest sugar planters and the brother of the Marqués de Casa Calvo, the former commander of Bayajá. The Nueva Holanda, meanwhile, was the largest and most mechanized mill on the island, thanks in part to innovations introduced by its Saint-Domingue technician, Julian Lardière. No account of the conversations during Someruelos’s five-day visit with Calvo has survived. We can imagine that, once the weather cleared, the new governor was treated to a tour of the impressive estate. Surely, the two men spoke about sugar and slavery and politics. Calvo may have explained his successful campaigns to buy out local tobacco growers and expand his sugar enterprise. Perhaps he skipped telling the new governor about a recent rebellion of slaves on the plantation in 1798. In any case, the governor whom local lore would soon describe as having been “rained from the sky” began his tenure much as Luis de las Casas had in 1790, establishing warm, personal links with the island’s creole sugar elite.