17
These circumstances, which defined the play of preferences and politics in Cuba,
changed as Spain moved to end slavery on the island. Slavery in Cuba was abolished
gradually, with a series of measures beginning in 1870, when Spanish legislation freed
any child born to parents living in slavery. In 1880, Spanish authorities in Cuba declared
the end of slavery, substituting an apprenticeship to last (as was the policy in Jamaica) for
eight years. To accelerate the process of transition, beginning in 1885, planters were
required to free one slave in every four each year, so that by 1888, slavery as an
institution would be abolished on the island (Ballou 1992; Ferrer 1999). In actuality, the
system collapsed even more quickly than this. As slaves ran away from their obligatory
labor as apprentices (or purchased their freedom) and legal authorities freed others as a
result of violations by their owners of the apprenticeship law (which required the payment
of a small stipend to all slaves), the numbers of slaves working in sugar production
dwindled down to a few. By 1885, only 53,000 slaves remained throughout all of Cuba
(Ferrer 1999, 95).
Three things accompanied the end of slavery in Cuba. First, a steep economic
decline preceded the abolition of slavery, caused by competition from European sugar
beet cultivation and the enormous cost and ruin of the Ten Years’ War. Second, creole
planters, in debt and unable to invest in new methods of production that could, in the face
of European competition, reclaim a place in the world market for Cuban sugar, gave way
to foreign property-holders, mainly from the United States. Third, more than a hundred
thousand desperately poor Spaniards arrived in Cuba, taking on many of the jobs slaves
once held. As a result, while decline and social dislocation accompanied the end of
slavery, Cuba’s stubborn economic misery during this period was perceived to be a
general societal malaise, not straightforwardly a product of abolition.
Convention