15
THE CUBAN CASE IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT
In Cuba, historical events transformed the opportunities available to Cuban elites
and the preferences of planters. Cuban planters were concerned that the process of
organizing a movement for securing national autonomy would further mobilize populations
of color, who would, after the achievement of independence, continue to press for a
meaningful voice in the new civic union. Further, this population of free blacks was
committed to the emancipation of Cuba’s slaves, which carried costs for Cuba’s planters.
When independence did come, it was the product of a complex assortment of causal factors
that included, but did not depend upon, the rather timid creole efforts to escape the
authority of Spanish masters.
Beginning in the eighteenth century, market forces and the evolving features of
colonial enterprise increased the focus on sugar production in Cuba. Sugar production, in
turn, played a central role in shaping Cuba's demographic landscape. Production of sugar
was centralized on private estates–there the cane was cultivated, harvested, processed,
and packaged (Dana 1859). The technology, while ingenious in its capacity to employ
nearly every scrap of cane for fertilizer, fuel, and production, required relatively little
training to master, but considerable muscle. In the fifty years prior to Cuba’s first failed
bid for independence, nearly 600,000 African slaves were delivered to the island. The
majority worked on sugar plantations (Ferrer 1999, 2).
Because of the persistence of manumission in Spain’s colonies, slaves could (and
often did) sell their labor to employers other than their owners and in time purchase their
freedom (and the freedom of spouses and children). Over time, as concerns about the
growth in the number of freedmen intensified, British, French, and Dutch colonies, as
Convention