Routes into Slavery in 18th-Century Cuba

Cuba’s late eighteenth-century sugar boom would not have been possible without an increase in the number of enslaved Africans brought to the island for sale.  Often the rapid take off of slave trading to Cuba at this time is attributed to the 1789 declaration of “free trade in slaves” in Spanish empire, coming just as the Haitian Revolution destroyed that island’s production and drove up global prices for the commodity and the demand for enslaved Africans in Cuba.  But how dramatic a departure was this new 1789 slave trading policy for Cuba and how did it affect pre-existing patterns of slave trading to the island?  This paper will explore the slave trade to Cuba in the late eighteenth century as a window on both the diverse origins of Cuba’s Afro-diasporic population and the hemispheric and transatlantic connections brokered by the trade in slaves.