geneza: Roberto Cofresí in popular culture

Evidence: 100 • authority: 72

Regarded as the last successful pirate of the Caribbean during the 19th century's suppression era, the life of Roberto Cofresí has been romanticized in his native Puerto Rico and neighboring nations. Already possessing a reputation as hard to capture in life, the freebooter became a symbol for an archipelago immersed in the political unrest caused by its status as a colony within the struggling Spanish Empire. Under these circumstances, Cofresí was soon characterized as a benign and generous thief. In a similar trend, he was also associated with the Puerto Rican independence movement of the era. During the late 19th and early 20th century, the abundant oral tradition led to a subgenre of fo…

Evidence: 33 • authority: 72

Piracy in the Caribbean refers to the historical period of widespread piracy that occurred in the Caribbean Sea. Primarily between the 1650s and 1730s, where pirates frequently attacked and robbed merchant ships sailing through the region, often using bases or islands like Port Royal. The era of piracy in the Caribbean began in the 1500s and phased out in the 1830s after the navies of the nations of Western Europe and North America with colonies in the Caribbean began hunting and prosecuting pirates. The period during which pirates were most successful was from the 1650s to the 1730s. Piracy flourished in the Caribbean because of the existence of pirate seaports such as Fort Saint Louis in…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

D. Miguel Enríquez (c. 1674–1743), was a privateer from San Juan who operated during the early 18th century. A mulato born out of wedlock, he was a shoemaker by occupation during his youth. After working for the governor as a salesman Enríquez was recruited to defend Puerto Rico, then a colony of the Spanish Empire. He commanded a couple of guarda costas, receiving a letter of marque and reprisal from the Spanish Crown for his performance. Operating during the height of the Golden Age of Piracy, Enríquez's fleet was also credited with controlling the proliferation of buccaneers in the region. However, he was considered a pirate himself by the merchants of other nations, since it was common…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

The folklore of Puerto Rico is distinctly syncretic, as it has been fed by the archipelago's constant influx of new social groups during thousands of years. It has been historically influenced by the groups that inhabited it during the Pre-Columbian era, the demographic and religious impact of the Spanish colonization of the Americas, the introduction of African slaves for the plantation economy, the daily life in a trade route including piracy or smugglers and, ultimately, the incorporation into the United States framework, that followed the Spanish-American War. In the last century, a multitude of homegrown aspects have begun differentiating local folklore further away from its historical…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

Renato Beluche (15 December 1780 – 4 October 1860) was a Louisiana-born Venezuelan merchant, pirate and privateer active in the early nineteenth century Gulf Coast. Born in New Orleans, Spanish Louisiana, to a French smuggler, Beluche went to sea as a pilot's mate in 1802 on board a Spanish Navy warship. By 1805, he had left the navy and become the master of a schooner. Using this ship, Renato turned to piracy and raided Spanish and British merchantmen operating in the gulf. After becoming associated with Spanish American patriots in Latin America, Renato joined their cause, spending over a decade fighting against the Spanish Empire for the cause of Latin American independence. During this…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

The Golden Age of Piracy was the period between the 1650s and the 1730s, when maritime piracy was a significant factor in the histories of the North Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Histories of piracy often subdivide the Golden Age of Piracy into three periods: The buccaneering period (approximately 1650 to 1680), characterized by Anglo-French seamen based in Jamaica, Martinique, and Tortuga attacking Spanish colonies, and shipping in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific to western Pacific. The Pirate Round (1690s), associated with long-distance voyages from various Caribbean and North American ports to established bases in countries like Madagascar, in order to rob Muslim and East India Company t…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

Roberto Cofresí y Ramírez de Arellano (June 17, 1791 – March 29, 1825), also known as El Pirata Cofresí, was a Puerto Rican pirate. He was born into a noble family, but the political and economic difficulties faced by the island as a colony of the Spanish Empire during the regional independence wars against the metropole meant that his household was poor. Cofresí worked at sea from an early age, which familiarized him with the region's geography, but provided him with only a modest salary. He eventually decided to abandon the sailor's life and become a pirate. He had previous links to land-based criminal activities, but the reason for Cofresí's change of vocation is unknown; historians spec…

Evidence: — • authority: 88

The Narratives and Life Projects of Orientales from Cuba in Puerto Rico and Florida. Blanca Ortiz-Torres and Mario A. Rodríguez-Cancel analyze the experience of Cubans born in the eastern region of Cuba, who have migrated to Puerto Rico and the United States in the past two decades. The participants in Ortiz-Torres and Rodríguez-Cancel’s interviews usually perceived themselves as different from Cubans from other regions, especially from habaneros , and those who live in the United States. They often expressed feeling like foreigners discriminated against in their own country of origin, since their migratory process often started by moving to Havana. The theme of discrimination has been cent…