They called him Lucifer, Captain Cornieles, or Diego de los Reyes. Behind these names lies a single legend: that of an Afrodescendant, born enslaved in Cuba, who became the terror of the Caribbean seas. Pirate, privateer, strategist, and survivor, Diego el Mulato embodies a forgotten figure of colonial history — a Black man in arms, master of his destiny, and sworn enemy of the Spanish Empire in the 17th century.
Born in chains, forged by the sea
Cuba, late 16th century.
The sun beats down on the docks of Havana. It is the age of galleons, of trade routes, and fortified outposts. In this flourishing Spanish colony, built on the blood of others, a child with no future is born: Diego Grillo, known as “el Mulato.” The son of an African enslaved woman and, perhaps, a sailor or colonial official, he inherits no surname, only a color: mulato. A term which, in the Spanish Empire, designates mixed-race children but also chains them to a rigid racial hierarchy.
Early on, he learns to survive in the shadow of tall ships. He grows up among chains and cargo, among laborers, beatings, and songs torn from evenings of exhaustion. But the child looks out to the sea. He senses that it can swallow empires — and perhaps also set him free.
In his teenage years, around 1572, Diego manages to escape. Whether he deserted, leapt into the sea, or was taken by force remains unclear. What’s certain is that he vanishes from the confined world of Havana and reappears in Nombre de Dios, Panama — a strategic transit point for gold looted from the Andes.
There, he meets Francis Drake.
The English privateer has just dealt a spectacular blow to the Spanish. His fleet includes disenfranchised sailors, allied Indigenous people, and maroons (escaped slaves). Diego finds his place among them. Not as a prisoner, but as a sailor. He becomes one of the first Black men to sail with the Protestant privateers — sworn enemies of the Catholic, slaveholding empire.
This shift changes everything. Diego Grillo has now crossed to the other side of the cannons. He is no longer the cargo — he is the strategist.
From fugitive to commander
In the fiery, powder-filled waters of the 17th-century Caribbean, Diego el Mulato becomes more than a survivor. He becomes a key player.
Over the years, he rises through the ranks of this floating war that entangles English privateers, Dutch buccaneers, spice traders, and sugar smugglers. First a simple helmsman — a demanding role requiring deep knowledge of winds and reefs — he becomes a scout, an interpreter, then soon a captain.
His allies? Outcasts: Protestant privateers warring against the Spanish Catholic monopoly, and more importantly, Cimarrons — escaped slaves who established their own territories in the forests of Central America.
With them, Diego el Mulato shares more than a common enemy:
He shares a language of resistance, a memory of humiliation, and a strategy of elusiveness.
The Cimarrons had built palenques, fortified maroon communities, some of which had lasted for generations. Diego strengthened them, armed them, integrated them into his Afro-Caribbean networks of counter-power.
The attack on campeche
In the 1630s, Diego stops at Providence Island — a Puritan stronghold established by the English near Nicaragua. This haven, both religious and military, has little tolerance for Spanish rule and sees in Diego a valuable ally: feared, autonomous, and familiar with Hispanic coasts.
In 1633, this alliance takes shape in a spectacular assault on Campeche, a strategic Spanish port on the Yucatán coast.
Alongside Cornelis Jol — a Dutch buccaneer nicknamed “Captain Lucifer” — Diego commands a combined force of 500 men across a dozen ships. The attack is swift and surgical. The city is taken. When the town’s elites refuse to pay the ransom, Diego orders it set ablaze. It’s a show of force — a warning sent to all of New Spain.
This event marks a turning point.
Diego el Mulato is no longer merely a former slave turned privateer.
He is now a tactical figure in Atlantic warfare, capable of disrupting trade routes, defying the Spanish army, and negotiating with European Protestant powers.
He becomes a legend — feared by colonial governors, respected by Cimarrons, and courted by those already dreaming of a world where Blackness is no longer a sentence.
In the musty corridors of colonial palaces, his name circulates like a bad omen.
Diego el Mulato, former slave turned buccaneer captain, haunts the dreams of bishops as well as military reports. He is the Black man who dared sail with white men — and command them.
He was called Captain Lucifer. Not for gratuitous cruelty, but because he burned churches, smashed saintly statues, and redistributed the sacred on his own terms. In ecclesiastical memory, he is described as an impious iconoclast, the one who “chops up saints with an axe and tramples them while laughing.”
But this act — often cited as proof of savagery — carried a deeper meaning: a complete rejection of the colonizers’ spiritual dominion over Black bodies.
Myth, identity, and disappearance
In the regions of Campeche, Bacalar, and the Yucatán coast, Spanish spy reports mention a rare phenomenon:
Convoys change course to avoid him.
Villages fortify their church towers fearing his return.
Merchants refuse to set sail without an escort “as long as the Mulato lives.”
He has become a living threat, an armed myth: the nightmare of an inverted racial order.
Then, in 1638, an unexpected twist. Diego Martín — his real name — sends an official letter to the Spanish governor of Cuba. He offers his services to the Crown.
“I am a loyal soldier, and I can defend your coasts against the Dutch and all who threaten your empire.”
A total reversal. Or perhaps a ruse. Some documents suggest he indeed received a royal pardon and an official post — possibly as a legalized privateer tasked with hunting Spain’s enemies.
Other sources claim he only used this opportunity to buy time, recover allies, and return to sea as soon as his immunity was secured. The historical truth is lost among censored reports, half-preserved letters, and posthumous accounts.
What is certain, however, is that the shadow of Diego el Mulato would linger over Caribbean waters for a long time.
Because beyond the pirate, beyond the traitor or the hero, he embodies an unresolved question:
What do you do with a free, armed Black man, master of his own path?
Diego el Mulato is not a name — he is a constellation. Colonial archives refer to him as Diego Grillo, Diego Martín, Diego de los Reyes, Dieguillo, or Captain Lucifer. According to sources, he was born in Havana, in Campeche, or even aboard a slave ship.
Some accounts say he was the son of a Dutch pirate and a free Cuban woman. Others identify him as a maroon slave who escaped his encomienda and was taken in by Dutch privateers. Still others claim he was merely a collective pseudonym — a mask used by several rebellious Afrodescendant sailors to throw off pursuers.
But the exact identity matters little. What all these stories reveal is the same dizzying reality:
That of a Black man, in a white world, who carved his destiny through rudder and gunpowder.
In an era where identity was rigidly defined by color, birth, and religion, Diego el Mulato represents the unraveling of the colonial order.
He is Black, but a captain.
He is baptized, but a blasphemer.
He speaks Spanish, but serves the English.
He burns churches, but spares the women of his enemies.
He negotiates with governors, then attacks them.
Through his many names and journeys, Diego becomes a figure of radical unrest — elusive, uncontrollable, unassimilable.
He seeks neither peace nor legitimacy — only autonomy, at sea and on land.
Most sources agree that he was captured and executed in 1673, probably hanged like so many Black pirates erased from official records.
But some historians — like Kris E. Lane or Nina Gerassi-Navarro — suggest this ending may have been crafted after the fact by the Spanish administration: a way to put an end to a legend too dangerous to live on.
Because a Black rebel who dies free is a model.
But a Black rebel hanged is a warning.
And yet, even hanged, Diego el Mulato continues to haunt maritime chronicles, inquisitorial archives, and postcolonial imaginations.
Sources
- Kris E. Lane, Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500–1750, M.E. Sharpe, 1998.
- Matthew Restall, The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatán, Stanford University Press, 2009.
- Jon Latimer, Buccaneers of the Caribbean: How Piracy Forged an Empire, Harvard University Press, 2009.
Summary
Born in Chains, Forged by the Sea
Sources
