Before the sentence was carried out, a Spanish priest gave Hatuey the opportunity to convert to Christianity and thus save his soul and ascend to heaven. Hatuey asked whether Christians went to heaven. When the friar answered that the good ones did, Hatuey at once answered that he preferred hell, “so as not to be where Spaniards were.”15 That may have been the first political speech recorded on Cuban soil. But it did nothing to avert Hatuey’s fiery death, nor to save Native people from the catastrophe already befalling them.
