The Music of the Netherlands Antilles. Jan Brokken

color of their skin or status. In several colonies the whites refused to obey this decree, and in the end Napoleon would rescind the measure at the insistence of his beloved Joséphine de Beauharnais, who in turn was under pressure from her relatives in Martinique. The whites of Saint-Domingue had long since sought the help of the English, not only France’s archenemy, but the insatiable great power that lay claim to every single island in the West Indies. The slaves revolted against the English occupation in Saint-Domingue, led by Toussaint L’Ouverture. He declared it the first black republic and changed its name to Haiti. Most whites died in the fighting, were slaughtered, or fled to Martinique, Guadeloupe, New Orleans, Curaçao, Trinidad, and especially to Oriente, the easternmost province of the Spanish colony of Cuba. It was there the contradanse intermingled with the songs of love and death from the Iberian peninsula.

      In Oriente the contradanza had much more of a lilt than the original contradanse. It was more passionate, more whimsical—though not totally. The first section remained as it had been originally—bare, cool, restrained; passions were not unleashed until the second section. The first section remained Western European, the second became Cuban. When listening to a danza you can actually hear the journey the music has made.

      The journey did not stop in Oriente. From Cuba the danza spread out over the entire Caribbean archipelago and large areas of South America, via Curaçao, which fulfilled the role of a port of transit. Practically every cargo and mail vessel bound for La Guaira, Belém, Recife, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, or Valparaiso called in at the island. Cargo and parcel post from other islands were loaded in the port of Willemstad, the largest in the Dutch Antilles. It was just as easy to take onboard the sheet music hot off the local presses, or the Spanish-language weekly Notas y Letras, also published on Curaçao.

      The island may have been part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, but the number of inhabitants originally from the mother country could be counted on the fingers of a couple of hands. Not until Shell Oil set up its refinery in 1918 did a Dutch district arise, called Emmastad, and thirty years later a second one, Julianadorp; before that, colonial authorities and military garrison lived together in Fort Amsterdam. Outside that enclave, most whites were Jewish or descended from Protestant colonists who had settled on the island between 1650 and 1750. The Jews married among themselves, as did those Protestants from the upper echelons of society. Lower-class Protestants were content with Venezuelan or “colored” partners. By the nineteenth century, however, the caste system was no longer viable owing to a lack of marriageable daughters. The whites with double surnames (the upper class) also opted for partners from the nearby continent. The Protestants became Latinized. Instead of staying at home over a cup of coffee discussing the sermon, their dances were now held after church services, and these weekly recurring parties went on from 11 A.M. until late into the afternoon. “No pen could describe the furious dances they engage in here. Old, young, everyone jumps in,” the amazed Dutch lieutenant Van der Goes wrote home in 1830.

      Among themselves the islanders spoke either Papiamentu or Spanish. Dutch was seldom heard in the streets. Curaçao was home to a host of Spanish-language publications with such titles as Noticiero, El Imparcial, El Comercio, El Liberal, La Ilustración, El Evangélico, Liberal, El Correo de las Antillas, and—characteristic of its readers—La Política Venezolana or El Eco de Venezuela.

      Notas y Letras was the most international. It had subscribers throughout Latin America. Unlike in Cuba, ruled with an iron fist by Spain, there was no longer censorship in the Dutch colony. The Cuban governor general held his own with the South American dictators, nipping all resistance in the bud and only giving permission for a performance of Bellini’s opera I Puritani when the word libertá had been substituted by the female name Lealtá.

      Because of the total freedom of the press on Curaçao, Notas y Letras could become the tribune for South American liberals. Besides its irreverent words, it also came with notes: musical scores were printed in the mid-section of the magazine. Countless Caribbean composers published their dances, waltzes, and mazurkas in Notas y Letras.

      No Argentinean wants to believe it, but initially the tango was much more popular in Willemstad than it was in Buenos Aires. In the second section of his danza, the Curaçaoan composer Jules Blasini often made use of the tango rhythm. Long before Argentineans let their hair down with the tango, Blasini had Curaçaoans dancing to this rhythm. He published his works in Notas y Letras—undoubtedly to the utter amazement of its Argentinean readers: in Buenos Aires the tango was only danced in clandestine locations and only by men.

      Notas y Letras’ libertarian ideals did not get in the way of the commercial basis underpinning the weekly publications. The publishers, the four sons of Agustín Bethencourt, were keen to have as many copies as they could roll off the presses their father had founded. Father Bethencourt had fled from Venezuela for political reasons; in Willemstad he carried on the liberal offensive he had initiated on the mainland.

      Curaçao had enjoyed a liberal reputation ever since 1812, when Simón Bolivar went into exile in Willemstad. During their three-month stay at the sparsely furnished house at Motetberg, he and his four fellow refugees were free to plan the liberation of South America, beginning with a series of battles in 1813 and ending in 1824 when the Spaniards departed. Bolivar’s two sisters stayed on Curaçao much longer, living on Curaçao until 1819 in an eight-sided house known as the Octagon.

      A procession of exiles followed El Libertador’s example. In 1821, two thousand monarchist Spaniards settled on Curaçao. They transformed the Otrobanda district into one huge casino, moving on two years later, tired and broke from rolling the dice, to Cuba, Puerto Rico, or Spain. The founders of the Dominican Republic, Juan Pablo Duarte, Juan Isidro Pérez, and Pedro Alejandrino Pina, lived on Curaçao before starting the revolution in 1844. Yet another civil war broke out in Venezuela, this time in 1845, and seven liberal politicians sought refuge on Curaçao. In 1858 the federalists fled to the neighboring island, including the future president of Venezuela, Antonio Guzmán Blanco. He moved into a building behind the post office in Otrobanda and gave refuge to so many freedom fighters there that the Venezuelan government threatened to invade Curaçao. Requests to have him extradited were refused, however, and Guzmán Blanco was finally able to return to Caracas as a free man. The black president of Haiti, who in 1852 had had himself crowned Emperor Faustus I, was forced to flee the country in 1865. He stowed away on the Curaçaoan schooner Rigoletta bound for Willemstad. Until his death he lived in the Keizershof (Emperor’s Courtyard), a practically windowless complex he had had built above the Santa Annabai and Otrobanda. At an angle below that Dracula castle, the next generation of exiles settled in houses built in the style of Havana, with flat roofs that served as verandas. For those Cubans who were at odds with the colonial authorities, Curaçao was the preferred place of exile, for they could make themselves understood in their own language and enjoy a staggering array of Spanish-language periodicals and radical documents.

      Curaçao emulated Amsterdam, which had given refuge to exiles and scarcely prohibited them from expressing their opinions, whether or not they were in writing.

      The liberalization of South America was far from being achieved by the middle of the nineteenth century. The political climate remained gruesome, owing to dictatorships, coups d’etat, and civil wars. Notas y Letras advocated that South America proceed along the lines set down by Simón Bolívar and Francisco de Miranda. The revolutionary general De Miranda, who died in a Spanish dungeon in 1816, had been an excellent flautist who practiced his passion for music every evening, even on the eve of the battle he would lose through an act of treachery. To him, the struggle for freedom should also lead to the cultural revival of South America, an idea that Augustin Bethencourt also adopted.

      Shortly after his arrival on Curaçao, Bethencourt set up a bookstore, a store selling musical instruments, a music and magazine publishing company, and a printing office. He owned a special typesetting machine that made it possible to print musical scores. It was his idea to establish Notas y Letras. He did not live to see the first issue, but his four sons took over the printing business and produced the weekly publication with its mid-section of musical scores, an absolutely unique publication in the huge area where it was distributed: from Santo Domingo to deep in the interior of Venezuela, from