9781422279809

people lived in or around the capital city of Havana, on the northeast coast of the island. Havana was the staging area for the treasure fleets that shipped gold and silver to Spain from the Spanish colonies in the New World. Cuba itself didn’t produce much in the way of trade goods. That minimized the demand for slaves as well as the influx of Spaniards. Cuba’s limited reserves of gold had long been exhausted. Slaves did toil in copper mines in the southeastern part of the island, near the city of Santiago de Cuba. They also worked on sugarcane plantations. Although the harvesting of sugarcane required a great deal of labor, the crop was not yet widely cultivated in Cuba. This was largely because of Spain’s policy of monopolizing trade with its overseas colonies. The colonies were legally permitted to export goods only to Spain (and were required to get all imports from Spain). International developments, beginning in the latter half of the 1700s, brought major changes to Cuba. Slavery on the island expanded dramatically as a result. In August 1762, British forces captured Havana and effec- tively took control of Cuba. Great Britain and France had been fighting a wide-ranging conflict called the Seven Years’ War. Spain had entered the war on the side of France in January 1762. The British freed slaves who had risen up and fought against Spanish forces during the battle of Havana. But, seeing the commercial potential of Cuban sugar, the British also brought up to 10,000 slaves from West Africa to Cuba in just one year. Those slaves were to provide the labor for greatly enlarged plantations run by British colonists.

12

The Culture and People of Cuba