Migratory Phenomenon and Criminal Casuistry

MIGRATORY PHENOMENON AND CRIMINAL CASUISTRY "Cuba is to blame...", this is how the journalist from La Palma, José de las Casas Pérez, said in 1929 about the old sociological phenomenon of the triumphant Indiano on his return to his homeland, because "he encouraged the painful emulations". His social success, however modest it was – to ascend, for example, to the category of small landowner – was enough to awaken in the peasant youth the illusion of going to Cuba, "and returning again 'to market a little house' or a yoke and compliment the girls with soft, honeyed peasant touches"; Such was the prestige that accompanied the figure of the Indiano that De las Casas refers to a usual scene, not at all anecdotal, as he assures, of the island's festival: "Drink, compadre. "No, you drink. -No way. First, you, compadre, because you have been to Havana.24 In short, the Indiano was the center of attention and general entertainment, some taking advantage of the fascination produced among the single girls to donjuanar at ease; all the more so the wealthy Indian, whose display of magnificence and generosity in his hometown aroused the fever of emigration in pursuit of the golden dream.25 It was logical, then, a denouement of frustration and failure in the Antilles for those who had set the bar of their ambition very high and yet lacked the capacity for sacrifice necessary to impose themselves on the prosaic reality that only hard work could open the way to the future. the gates of prosperity. Some of these defeated of fortune who returned home without the expected success, at most only with the apparent aura of the Indian, had a negative influence as agents of criminality in the land. There is a certain parallel with the principles of Mertonian structuralism, one of the modern sociological theories of crime, according to which when the channels of vertical mobility are closed in a society that exalts the accumulation of material wealth, social ascent, success at any price and that, on the contrary, condemns failure – in reference to the 'American dream' in the United States, but to some extent transferable to the 'Indian dream' of the islanders, deviant behavior becomes the "normal" reaction of the less favored social strata.26 We will also see how Cuba, so often praised for its beneficial influence on La Palma, sometimes exerted a perverse influence on the distance. On the one hand, mythologized as the promised land, it allowed certain mystifiers to develop a real business of white slavery, from ominous labor contracts to the trafficking of women (a subject that we will address here at least briefly), to the infamous conditions of boat transport. On the other hand, given the economic dependence of our small Atlantic island on the Antilles, we will point out the effect that the Cuban war at the end of the century had on the criminality of La Palma. Cuba, after all, was also the last refuge for many island criminals on the run, a survival of what was a transgressive formula customarily legitimized in the past.27 According to the Registry of Convicts of the Court of First Instance of Santa Cruz de La Palma, between 1873 and 1931, 16% of those were prosecuted in absentia. 28 which means that at least a few dozen islanders with accounts with the justice system were able to put the Atlantic Ocean in the way, especially those who owed money29 and those who committed crimes of a sexual nature.