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23 o n e Slavery in Western Cuba, 1792–1825 The island of Cuba is a colossus, but he is standing on the sand; he remains erect only because of the constant calm that surrounds him; but the probability already exists that strong hurricane winds will shake him and that his fall will be both fast and inevitable unless we, in anticipation, strengthen his foundation. —félix varela, 1823 W hen the Cuban priest Félix Varela wrote the passage excerpted above, he was certain of the message that he was transmitting to his readers. Prior to 1791, when the government of Captain General Luis de las Casas came to power, the island of Cuba had witnessed the beginnings of a plantation model, based on the production of sugar cane, in its western region. During Las Casas’s time a revolution in the French colony of Saint Domingue changed the state of affairs not only within the Caribbean Basin but across the Atlantic world. This event would play a pivotal role in the future of Cuba’s economy. Only a decade after the arrival of Las Casas and the beginning of the revolution in Saint Domingue, Cuba, until then heavily dependent on its relationship with New Spain, had become one of the world’s leading producers and exporters of sugar and one of the main slave regimes in the Atlantic world.1 Nevertheless, in spite of the early advances of the Cuban elites at the time, the future of this new plantation system was not decided until after the end of the Trienio Constitucional in Spain in 1823. Until then, debates between the proslavery and proabolition sides raged in both Havana and Madrid and kept all involved speculating over the island’s future. The story of the transition from a local economy to a leading international one did not begin in 1791; it had begun almost three decades earlier. In 1762 a large part of western Cuba, including the capital, Havana, fell into the hands of the 24 · The Great African Slave Revolt of 1825 British. When Spain entered the Seven Years’ War on the French side, Britain found herself free to initiate military action against the Spanish colonies in the New World.2 Havana’s significant geographical position made it an obvious target for the British, and it was finally attacked and taken in 1762. Thus, between August 1762 and July 1763 most of western Cuba fell under the protection and rule of King George III. This event had enormous repercussions for Cuba’s subsequent economic and political developments. From then on, the British enjoyed a prominent position in the minds of the island’s inhabitants. Beginning in 1763, the emergent Creole elites took it upon themselves to oversee the governance of Cuba, particularly its economic and social progress, and appealed to the memory of the peligro inglés (English threat) to justify blunders and misdemeanors in order to obtain monetary benefits and to legitimize their proslavery politics whenever necessary.3 The Creole elites who emerged after 1763 were by no means ordinary, nor were their lives and the time they lived in. They witnessed the signing of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the emergence of the first American republic. They looked on in horror when the French Jacobins freed the slaves and the French monarch and his consort were decapitated amid revolutionary mayhem. And they watched in disbelief as, closer to home, the previously af- fluent colony of Saint Domingue became the stage for a bloody slave rebellion that eventually turned into a revolution and created the second independent republic in the continent, a black republic where the former Bourbon social order was turned upside down and the whites were killed or forced to flee. Men such as the merchant and planter Bernabé Martínez de Pinillos,4 originally from La Rioja, Spain, participated in the war between the colonies of North America and England and amassed fortunes by importing Africans, ably profiting from the French debacle in Saint Domingue. They sent their sons to the Peninsula to wage a war of resistance against the French invaders, in which some of them died. They ended their days with medals hanging heavy from their chests, continuing the endless payments associated with their titles of nobility, and seeing their old companions dying around them, while their sons were given the highest positions within the state, religious, and military institutions of Ferdinand VII’s absolute monarchy in Spain and...

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