Cipriano Castro
José Cipriano Castro Ruiz (Capacho Viejo, Táchira, October 12, 1858 – Santurce, Puerto Rico, December 4, 1924) was a Venezuelan soldier, politician, liberal revolutionary, and dictator who He became head of state from 1899 after the triumph of the Restoring Liberal Revolution until the coup d'état in Venezuela in 1908.
Early Years
He was born in Venezuela, in a town near the current city of Capacho Viejo, the son of José del Carmen Castro, a middle-income farmer, and Pelagia Ruiz. After completing his first studies in his native town and in the city of San Cristóbal, he continued his training at the Colegio Seminario de Pamplona (Colombia) (1872-1873).
Military experience and introduction to politics
In 1876 Castro opposed the candidacy of General Francisco Alvarado Arellano for the presidency of the state of Táchira. In 1878 he was working as manager of the newspaper El Álbum when he participated with a group of independentistas in the capture of San Cristóbal by refusing to submit to the authority of the new president of the state.
In 1884 he had a disagreement with a parish priest, Juan Ramón Cárdenas in Capacho, which led to his imprisonment in San Cristóbal. After six months he escaped and took refuge in Cúcuta where he ran an inn. There he met his future wife, Zoila Rosa Martínez, who would be known as Doña Zoila. In June 1886 he returned to Táchira as soldier, accompanying generals Segundo Prato, Buenaventura Macabeo Maldonado and Carlos Rangel Garbiras to once again raise the flag of autonomy, to the dismay of the governor of the Táchira region, general Espiritu Santo Morales. Castro defeated government forces at Capacho Viejo and at Rubio.
Promoted to general, Castro began to stand out in the internal politics of the Táchira state. It was during the funeral of a comrade in struggle, Evaristo Jaimes, who had died in the previous fight, that Castro met Juan Vicente Gómez, his future comrade in his rise to power. He entered politics and became governor of his province of Táchira, but went into exile in Colombia when the Caracas government was overthrown in 1892 during the Legalista Revolution. Castro lived in Colombia for seven years, amassing a fortune in the illegal cattle trade and recruiting a private army.
Liberal Restorative Revolution
In 1898, as the destabilization of the government of Ignacio Andrade increased, the dynamism of Castro's supporters grew, which eventually formed a Revolutionary Committee. At the beginning of 1899, after unsuccessful conversations with Carlos Rangel Garbiras, in order to carry out a joint action, Castro decided to organize together with Juan Vicente Gómez and other supporters, the so-called Restoring Liberal Revolution, which began with the invasion of the national territory from Cúcuta, Colombia, on May 23, 1899.
The revolution was possible due to Andrade's weakness and clumsiness in relation to the anarchy of the military leaders. Said revolutionary movement triumphs after fighting some battles in a lightning war.
Government
President Andrade abandoned the country before the unstoppable advance of the Andean hosts of Castro, who finally entered Caracas on October 22, 1899, taking charge of the presidency of the Republic until December 1908.
Since then, the new government has dedicated itself to starting a centralist project, modernizing the armed forces under the Prussian model, energizing the coffee-dependent economy (Venezuela was the second largest producer in the world after Brazil), restoring Gran Colombia, canceling the external debt and allied with the most influential caudillos in the country but thereby weakening many others. To do this, he used the system of alliances created by Antonio Guzmán Blanco to impose central government officials in each of the country's regions, given this many caudillos found themselves in the dilemma of on the one hand supporting the central government or risking being isolated and powerless due to these reforms.
Liberating Revolution
The Liberation Revolution (1901-1903) was a civil war, in which a coalition of caudillos headed by the banker Manuel Antonio Matos del Monte, allied with transnational companies (New York & Bermúdez Company and the Orinoco Steamship Company, among others), tried to overthrow the government of Cipriano Castro. Matos planned and directed the initial operations from the island of Trinidad, managing to convince several local caudillos dissatisfied with the government to join the fight. Finally in January 1902 he landed near Coro, at which time the civil war spread throughout the country.
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Some 150 battles were fought including the failed invasion of Carlos Rangel Garbiras from Colombia. In some of the battles, Castro personally participated at the head of the official troops, including the most important, the siege of La Victoria in November 1902, where with 6,500 men he managed to defeat the 14,000 anti-Castro revolutionaries who were trying to take Caracas by force. After La Victoria, the uprisings were divided due to internal discrepancies, which in the long run were the cause of their defeat because the Castro government took advantage of their division to defeat each caudillo separately, reconquering the territory they had won. Even so, some active rebel groups remained in some eastern areas, mainly supporters of General Nicolás Rolando entrenched in Ciudad Bolívar. After a naval blockade, Juan Vicente Gómez orders the landing of troops and fights the bloody battle of Ciudad Bolívar. General Rolando surrenders along with his staff on July 21, 1903, signaling the official end of the civil war.
The defeat of the Revolución Libertadora marked the end of the 19th century in Venezuela characterized by political instability, bipartisanship and disputes between warlords, where the method of reaching power was through armed rebellion, and the end of the era of the great Venezuelan civil wars, giving way to a stage of consolidation of the central government under the government of the Andeans.
Blockade of Venezuelan coasts
The political instability of the country, the government's confrontation with the anti-Castro caudillismo and the decrease in the prices of agricultural exports, particularly coffee (Venezuela was the second largest producer in the world behind Brazil), forced Castro to temporarily suspend the service of the foreign debt. On the other hand, the claims that the different European powers make as a result of damages suffered by foreigners residing in the country as a result of civil wars continue. These problems remain the same, but the country's position is different.
The main powers demand immediate payment of their money in the middle of the Liberating Revolution. Faced with the government's refusal to recognize the claims and the suspension of debt payments, Germany and England resolved to blockade the Venezuelan coasts as of December 9, 1902, applying Gunboat Diplomacy, just over a month after siege of victory Italy joined this initiative on December 12 and, shortly after, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, the United States, and Spain presented their claims to be considered along with those of the aggressor countries.
During this conflict, the Castro regime decrees a general amnesty and manages a nationalist political discourse confronting foreign powers at the same time that the German and English battleships sink several Venezuelan warships and bombard La Guaira, Puerto Cabello and the island of San Carlos. Without a fleet to face the aggressors, President Castro defends himself with a resounding proclamation: "The insolent plant of the Foreigner has desecrated the sacred soil of the Homeland!". Its echo is reflected in the Drago Doctrine, signed by the Argentine Foreign Minister of the time, Luis María Drago, through which he argues the illegality of the violent collection of debts by the most important powers on earth to the detriment of the sovereignty, stability and dignity of weak states.
The mediation of President Theodore Roosevelt of the United States, forced by the excessive use of force in contravention of the postulates of the Monroe Doctrine, manages to end the conflict with the signing of the Washington Protocols on February 13, 1903. The parties in conflict agree to the immediate lifting of the naval blockade, the reduction of the external debt from 352 million bolivars to 150.9 million, and a progressive payment schedule paying 30% of the customs revenue of the country.
Breakdown of diplomatic relations with France, the United States and the Netherlands
On April 19, 1904, he reformed the Civil Code of Venezuela. Once the crisis of the European blockade was overcome, the international policy of the Castro government continued to unfold between confrontations and conflicts, and lawsuits began with the companies that participated in the Liberating Revolution; this materialized in a lawsuit filed against New York &; Bermúdez Company, in which the nation claims compensation of 50 million bolivars, and, secondly, the expropriation of the Orinoco Steamship Co. begins. Both cases lead to the rupture of diplomatic relations between Venezuela and the United States in 1908.
But the confrontations are not only with the companies linked to the Liberating Revolution, in 1905 the nation's contract with the French Interoceanic Cable Company is terminated. Castro ordered the closure of the company's offices in the country and the expulsion of the French Chargé d'Affaires. As a consequence, in 1906 Venezuela and France broke off diplomatic relations, motivating the expulsion of the Corsican colony settled in Paria. At the same time, the regime confronts Dutch companies and orders the mandatory requisition of Dutch-flagged ships, all of which also leads to the rupture of diplomatic relations with the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the naval blockade of national ports. by Dutch warships.
Disease and coup d'état
In 1894 Cipriano Castro suffered from a vesico-colonic fistula, a rare disease characterized by urinary tract infections or the leakage of intestinal gas through the urethra during urination (pneumaturia) due to an abnormal connection between the bladder and another organ or skin such as the intestines (entero-vesical fistula). An attempt was made to operate on him but while he was being intervened there was a drop in blood pressure with a cardiorespiratory arrest, for which he gave up the operation.
In 1906 he briefly resigned from the presidency but was reinstated during La Aclamación. In February 1907 Castro received the news that the opposition general Antonio Paredes had invaded Venezuela through Pedernales; half asleep from painkillers, it is said, by means of a coded telegram he gave the order for the firing squad of the enemy, whose corpse was thrown into the Orinoco River. It was the only execution of the 20th century. When his state of health worsened due to syphilis, on November 23, 1908, Gómez became president in his capacity as first vice president.
The next day Castro embarks on the ship Guadaloupe bound for Europe to get cured. He is accompanied by a delegation that includes his wife Zoila, the sister of the president Nieves Castro de Parra, and several doctors, doctors Pablo Acosta Ortiz, José Antonio Baldó and Rafael Fonseca.
Castro's trip abroad was seen as a propitious occasion to organize a new revolutionary movement by the leaders of yellow liberalism and nationalism in exile, who once again had the support of foreign powers (United States United States of America, France and the Netherlands), which had broken diplomatic relations with Venezuela. His absence from the country is used by his compadre Juan Vicente Gómez to launch a coup on December 19, 1908. In Berlin, eminent surgeons from the Gustav Adolphe Ysrael clinic perform a nephrectomy on him, the treatment being successful.
Exile and death
Castro, once recovered from the surgical operation he underwent in Berlin, intends to return to regain power. In 1909 he left for America but stayed in Martinique where he suffered a dehiscence in the operated wound and sent his wife, Zoila, to La Guaira, with instructions to "talk to General Gómez, take care of his house and other private matters" , but he gave orders not to allow their landing. They returned to Europe, aboard the steamer Versailles, practically forced by the French authorities. Castro suffered harassment from the powers that resented the policy that he maintained towards them during the 8 years that he was in power. Lacking the resources to carry out an armed invasion, he went to Madrid to later recover from his operation in Paris and Santa Cruz de Tenerife. At the end of 1912 he intends to spend a season in the United States, but is arrested and harassed by the immigration authorities on Ellis Island and forced to leave under peremptory terms (February 1913).
He finally settled with his wife in Santurce, Puerto Rico (1916), under close surveillance by spies sent by Juan Vicente Gómez. In 1917, despite his appalling relations with the United States government, US officials, disgusted by Gómez's neutral attitude towards the events of World War I, established contact with Castro so that he would lead a possible armed reaction against of the Venezuelan government, which it nevertheless rejects.
His wife, Zoila Martínez de Castro, requests and obtains permission to return to Venezuela where she was able to live out her last years quietly, without being bothered, including protecting both her personal integrity and her property after Gómez's death in 1935; by the presidents Eleazar López Contreras, Isaías Medina Angarita, Rómulo Betancourt, Rómulo Gallegos, Carlos Delgado Chalbaud and Germán Suárez Flamerich. Doña Zoila knew how to perform with great decorum and respectability as the first lady of Venezuela.
Castro spent the rest of his life in exile in Puerto Rico, making various plans to return to power, none of which were successful. Castro died on December 4, 1924 in Santurce, Puerto Rico. His remains rested in the San Juan de Puerto Rico cemetery until May 25, 1975, when they were repatriated and buried in a mausoleum in his hometown. On February 14, 2003, they were transferred to the National Pantheon by express order of President Hugo Chávez in commemoration of the hundred years of the naval blockade against Venezuela.
In popular culture
Cipriano Castro became the target of international satire due to his controversies and conflicts with European countries and the United States. A large number of cartoons and caricatures published around the world were compiled by the American researcher William M. Sullivan and presented in the book Cipriano Castro en la caricature worldwide (1980), under the seal of the now extinct Fundación for the Rescue of the Venezuelan Documentary Collection (FUNRES), at the initiative of the historian and politician Ramón José Velásquez.
In the middle of the 20th century, an unusual interest arose in his figure, both in historical review, essays and fiction. One of the most famous books of this period is that of Mariano Picón Salas: Los días de Cipriano Castro (1953), which would earn him the 1954 National Literature Award.
Castro was known under the nickname "El Cabito", a translation of the nickname le petit caporal with which Napoleon Bonaparte was designated, a character that Castro often tried to emulate. El Cabito (1909) was the title of a famous novel by Pedro María Morantes «Pío Gil», which harshly satirized the Liberal Restoration regime. A film adaptation of this book was released in 1978, directed by Daniel Oropeza.
On November 23, 2012, the opera El Jámás Vencido, with music and libretto by Edwin García, premiered at the Luis Gilberto Mendoza theater in the city of San Cristóbal. In 2017, the film La planta insolente was presented, based on the life of Castro, starring Roberto Moll and directed by Román Chalbaud.