Cuba
Havana, Cuba was the busiest African slave market in the Americas in 1839, north of Brazil. By the time the Tecora discharged its cargo of several hundred Africans (including the Amistad captives), an average of 50 slaving expeditions a year were landing in Cuba, importing over 10,000 slaves annually to the Havana-Matanzas region alone.
These importations fed the island's booming, brutal ingenios -- its sugar plantation-mills. Cuba was the largest sugar exporter in the world in 1839.
The Trata -- the transatlantic slave trade -- was technically illegal here; England and Spain, which held Cuba as a colony, had signed a treaty in 1817 cutting it off, and had strengthened the pact in 1837. Nevertheless, Cuban authorities openly sanctioned slave trading.
By 1839, Cuba was the last major slave society in the West Indies. Emancipation several years before in the British West Indies, including nearby Jamaica, had left Cuban authorities feeling surrounded and besieged by abolitionist intrigue. Beneath this perception lurked darker fears: of slave insurrection, massacre, mayhem. A fiercely defensive mentality had taken hold of Cuba. So, for example, in 1837 the captain-general of the colony had ordered the imprisonment of all foreign black seamen arriving at Havana -- a measure also taken in southern American ports.
Another example: as the Amistad sailed out of Havana harbor, it passed a ship, the Romney, that had been dispatched by the British in 1837 to collect Africans freed by the Royal Navy from illegal slavers. When the Cubans learned the British had manned the ship with a West Indian regiment of 15 uniformed black soldiers, port authorities refused to let the black soldiers ashore, terrified they would foment or inspire insurrection among the slaves of Havana. So the Amistad, on her way out to sea, passed something like a portent: a ship that carried what was for Cuban authorities a profoundly dangerous image, of armed black men -- freed slaves, soldiers of freedom.
- In the Exploring Amistad Library: The diplomatic correspondence gives a good feel for Cuban and Spanish attitudes about the colony, the slave trade, abolitionist and imperial intrigue, and other issues. See, e.g., the diplomatic communique from the Spanish Foreign Minister to the U.S. ambassador John Eaton, February 22, 1838, for Spanish-Cuban fears of American and British abolitionist intrigue; and instructions from U.S. Secretary of State John Forsyth to Aaron Vail, U.S. Charge d’Affaires at Madrid, July 15, 1840 for a U.S. perspective on the global imperial situation at the time, and the destabilizing role Cuban complicity in the slave trade played in the situation.
Further Reading: David R. Murray, Odious Commerce: Britain, Spain and the Abolition of the Cuban Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
Eric Roorda, “Cuba, America, and the Sea: Part I, ‘The Strong Tap-Root of Interest’,”The Log of Mystic Seaport, Spring 1997, pp. 74-82.
