Timeline: Cuba and the Caribbean
1762
Spain enters the Seven Years’ War. Cuba becomes a key military objective for
the British, and is invaded. Once occupied, the Port of Havana opens to free trade
with Great Britain. Trade blossoms, including the slave trade: over the 10-month
period of British occupation from 1762-63, 10,000 slaves are carried into Havana.
Commercial links develop between Cuba and North America. Spain subsequently reacquires
the colony and reimposes tight commercial restrictions.
1789
Spain opens the slave trade to Havana, and a royal decree authorizes shipbuilding
in the port -- part of a general program of imperial reform under the Bourbon monarchy
loosening colonial commercial restrictions in Cuba. From this point, imperial policies
fluctuate, but periodically permit the strengthening of the sugar industry on the
island and commercial ties with the United States.
1791
August 21: A slave uprising erupts near Le Cap in St. Domingue (Santo Domingo), and
spreads like wildfire -- the beginning of the end of slavery in the French colony.
1794
The French National Convention emancipates French colonial slaves.
1795
Pinckney’s Treaty establishes commercial relations between U.S. and Spain. (On the
basis of this treaty Spanish officials will eventually demand return of the Amistad
and the slaves it carried.)
1796-98
A massive English invasion force takes back some lesser Antilles colonies, but fails
to recapture Santo Domingo.
1800
After several years of growth in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, the number of
American ships putting in at Cuba has swollen to 600.
1802
A French invasion force led by Leclerc tries to retake Santo Domingo. Revolutionary
leader Touissant Louverture is arrested and dies in prison. But the invasion bogs
down, and French soldiers die in droves during 1802-1803, eventually forcing the
French to withdraw.
1804
January 1: The independent Republic of Haiti is proclaimed.
1815
At the Congress of Vienna, Britain compels Spain, Portugal, France and the Netherlands
to abolish the slave trade (though Spain and Portugal are permitted a few years of
continued slaving to replenish labor supplies).
1817
September 23: Great Britain and Spain sign a treaty prohibiting the slave trade:
Spain agrees under intense British pressure to end the slave trade north of the equator
immediately, and south of the equator in 1820. The agreement gives British naval
vessels the right to search suspected slavers. Still, loopholes in the treaty undercut
its goals and the slave trade flows strongly into Cuba.
1818
Spain opens Cuba to world trade.
1819
The Adams-Onis
Treaty formally renews commercial ties between the U.S. and Spain.
1820
Legal slave trade into Cuba abolished by terms of 1817 treaty with England.
1886
Slavery abolished in Cuba.
1822
Responding to rife piracy near Cuba and Puerto Rico as competing royalist and revolutionary
Latin American privateers fight for control over Caribbean commerce, the U.S. Navy
establishes a West India Squadron. The “mosquito fleet” patrols the inlets of the
Cuban coast, cleaning out pirates.
1826
The Spanish government proclaims free any slave managing to prove he had been illegally
imported, and implements new regulations requiring captains of vessels arriving from
Africa to turn their logbooks over to port authorities to be inspected for evidence
of illegal slaving. British officials complain that the new measures are paper-thin.
And indeed in August, when British naval officers try to prosecute the Spanish schooner
Minerva for landing six boatloads of slaves in Havana at night, General Francisco
Dionisio, the captain-general of Cuba, refuses to let the case be brought before
the court of mixed commission, on the grounds the incident had not occurred on the
high seas -- one of a series of incidents in which Cuban authorities block British
efforts to curb illegal slaving.
1827
A census of Cuba reveals a slave population of 287,000, most of them working
on some 1,000 ingenios (sugar plantation-mill complexes).
1831
A slave revolt breaks out in the British colony of Jamaica, which is brutally repressed
by colonial authorities.
1833
Great Britain passes the Abolition of Slavery Act, providing for emancipation in
the British West Indies -- set to take effect August 1834. Most British colonies
replace slavery with a period of enforced "apprenticeship."
1834
In a trade war between the U.S. and Spain, both nations raise duties and restrict
imports, strangling the Cuban carrying trade.
1835
June 28: The Anglo-Spanish agreement on the slave trade is renewed with tightened
enforcement. British cruisers are authorized to arrest suspected Spanish slavers
and bring them before mixed commissions established at Sierra Leone and Havana. Vessels
carrying specified “equipment articles” (extra mess gear, lumber, foodstuffs) are
declared prima-facie to be slavers.
1836
Spain appoints a consul in Jamaica, to report on abolitionist activity there.
Over the next few years, this office reports on a series of (largely imagined) plots
to send agents and propaganda to Cuba to foment a slave insurrection.
The British government dispatches a Superintendent of Liberated Africans to Havana to oversee the disposition of Africans freed from captured slavers.
1837
Cuban Captain-General Miguel Tacon orders the imprisonment of all foreign black
seamen while their ships are in port in Havana.
H.M.S. Romany arrives in Havana to take on a load of freed slaves, carrying
a regiment of black soldiers. In a tense standoff, Cuban authorities refuse to allow
these men to land in Havana, and the British refuse to withdraw the vessel. After
over a year, the Spanish government grudgingly gives ground.
1838
In the British West Indies, colonial assemblies dismantle the system of apprenticeship
that has replaced slavery. Laws against vagrancy and squatting attempt to keep the
social and labor system of the plantation economy intact, with varying results.
1839
August 27: The Amistad is seized off Long Island and taken to New London.
September 6: Spanish officials demand the return of the “assassins” and ”mutineers.”
1841
Nicholas Trist is dismissed as U.S. Consul in Havana, amid allegations he connived
at the illegal sale of U.S. vessels to Spanish slave traders.
1849
The first in a series of Cuban filibustering expeditions launches from the American
South, attempting to seize the colony for the U.S.
1888
Slavery abolished in Brazil, ending slavery in the Americas.
