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.