Show  The Cuban Slave Trade in a Period of Transition, 1790-1843 HERBERT S. KLEIN Among the oldest and most varied of the major slave trades to America was the African Slave trade to Cuba. Going back to the earliest days of the settlement of the island in the 16th century, the Cuban trade lasted longer than any other major American slave trade and was not effectively terminated until the mid-1860's. During this three hundred and fifty year period the trade underwent constant change, reflecting the fundamental shifts in the basis of the Cuban economy. Until Cuba emerged as a major plantation export economy at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, it was essentially a marginal economy within the American empire of Spain. In the first fifty years after the Spanish Conquest of 1511, placer gold mining was the primary industry, and the Amerindian population of Cuba and the surrounding islands was the prime source of labor. But the gold deposits soon were exhausted and the Amerindian population destroyed, so that the economy drifted into a gênerai cattle and mixed farming economy. It was only its choice location as a major entrepôt for New World shipping and as a key défensive position in the Carib- bean empire of Spain that revitalized the Cuban economy from the 1650's to the 18th century. The création of a major garrison port at Havana and the massive use of the city as a provisioning site for outbound shipping provided the island's interior with important markets for its food. At the same time the slow growth of a small freeholders tobacco economy and a thriving lumber industry added to the gênerai économie growth of the island. Although African slaves were constantly imported into the island, the economy as a whole did not produce a surplus suflicient to finance the major importation of slave labor, and the — 67 — Rec franc, d'hist. d'Outre-Mer, t. LX1I (1975), n°* 226-227.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, Cuba was dependent on an economy based on the sugarcane and coffee crops, and on slaves imported from Africa to work on sugar and coffee plantations. It is estimated that over 600,000 Africans were taken from West Africa and shipped to Cuba over three centuries, with tens of thousands dying during the brutal Atlantic Crossing. Most of these people were brought to Cuba between the 1780s and the 1860s, as the slave population rose from 39,000 to 400,000. Despite the fact that the U.S. slave trade to Cuba was illegal after 1794, U.S. traders, including the DeWolf family, frequently made slave voyages to Havana, and profited from their own Cuban plantations. 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. Although Britain and the U.S. abolished their slave trades in 1807 and 1808, and Britain pressured Spain into formally ending the trade to Cuba in the 1820s, Cuba remained one of the most common destinations for slave ships through the 1860s. Slavery itself was not abolished in Cuba until 1886. Sources: David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, eds., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge, 1999); Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997); Eric Williams, From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean, 1492-1969 (New York: Vintage Books, 1970). What year did slavery end in Cuba?Cuba stopped officially participating in the slave trade in 1867 but the institution of slavery was not abolished on the island until 1886. The demand for cheap labor never abated of course, and plantation owners sought other ways of obtaining workers.
How did slavery in Cuba end?Very slowly, the Moret law passed by the Spanish Cortes in 1870 for qualified emancipation came to be enforced. An act of 1879 speeded the process, and by 1886 slavery in Cuba supposedly ended.
When did slaves come to Cuba?From the 1500s, Spanish colonizers brought about 8,000 Africans, largely from West Africa, to Cuba as slaves, to work the sugar plantations. By 1838, at their peak, there were nearly 400,000 slaves on the island.
How many slaves did Cuba get from Africa?In the 19th century Cuba imported more than 600,000 African slaves, most of whom arrived after 1820, the date that Spain and Great Britain had agreed would mark the end of slave trading in the Spanish colonies.
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