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Slavery in Cuba was a portion of the larger Atlantic slave trade that primarily supported Spanish plantation owners engaged in the sugarcane trade. It was practiced on the island of Cuba from the 16th century until it was abolished by Spanish royal decree on October 7, 1886.
Cuba - Slavery, Sugarcane, Caribbean: During the 18th century Cuba depended increasingly on the sugarcane crop and on the expansive, slave-based plantations that produced it. In 1740 the Havana Company was formed to stimulate agricultural development by increasing slave imports and regulating agricultural exports.
The results had long-term repercussions: Cuba became the largest slave colony in all of Hispanic America, with the highest number of enslaved persons imported and the longest duration of the illegal slave trade.
At the peak of the slave-based economy, enslaved people comprised nearly one-third of the Cuban population. There were a number of anti-slavery movements in the early 1800s, but those were violently suppressed and leaders of the revolts were executed.
Situated along both the Old and New Bahama Channels — important deep-water sea lanes — Cuba was “the key and gateway of the Americas,” where the Spanish silver fleet gathered at Havana’s immense port. Unsurprisingly then, both Cuba and Havana had been the target of several assaults since 1537.
Abstract. This article reviews scholarship on the history and historiography of slavery in Cuba. In the sixteenth-century, Africans crossed the Atlantic and accompanied Diego Velésquez and other Spanish conquistadors in the first expeditions sent to subjugate Cuba.
Within the framework of Cuban national history, the period before 1790 and indeed the entire “era of the asientos” represent the backstory to what has traditionally been seen as the main story, the take-of of sugar plantation slavery in the final decade of the eighteenth century.
The massive expansion of slavery in Cuba and in the US South in the first half of the nineteenth century led Cuban and Southern planters to perceive new geopolitical cartographies that challenged existing cultural, linguistic, and political borders.
Slave Emancipation in Cuba is the classic study of the end of slavery in Cuba. Rebecca J. Scott explores the dynamics of Cuban emancipation, arguing that slavery was not simply abolished by the metropolitan power of Spain or abandoned because of economic contradictions.
Increasingly, slaves took advantage of any opportunity to free themselves and their families. In Cuba, slave response to slavery, especially as the system disintegrated, went well beyond accommodation and resistance. Emancipation did not initiate the collapse of plantation agriculture in Cuba.