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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2015
In the nineteenth century Cuba was the focus of Spain's overseas commercial involvement. The Cuban sugar boom keep alive an otherwise moribund and truncated empire. Spain's interest in Cuban sugar brought her into a web of trade contacts stretching to the other side of the Atlantic. Sugar production still required the exploitation of black labor; Spain, whose trade in West Africa had been minimal in the eighteenth century, became, through the presence of her slavers, a major presence in the region. The impetus for this involvement came from the community of interests between Cuban planters and Spanish suppliers of labor. Mid-nineteenth Spanish involvement in West Africa can be seen as a curious form of Hispano-Antillean commercial imperialism, in which Africa was seen as the answer to Cuba's demand for black emigration as well as immigration.
1 Colonial Office 82/11, James Stephen to J. Strangways, February 2, 1839.
2 C. O. 82/11, James Stephen to W. Strangways, February 8, 1839.
3 Foreign Office 84/354, Aston to Palmerston, July 24, 1841. It should be noted that Cuban delegates had not sat in the Cortes since 1837.
4 de los Rios, Juan Miguel, Memoria de las islas de Fernando Póo y Annobón (Madrid: La Sociedad Matritense, 1844), p. 65.Google Scholar
5 Arija, Julio, La Guinea española y sus riquezas (Madrid: Espana-Calpe, S.A., 1930), p. 19.Google Scholar
6 Ibid.
7 de Moros, Jose y Morellón, , Memorias sobre las islas africanas de España, Femando Póo y Annobón (Madrid: Compañía Tipografica, 1844), pp. 30–31.Google Scholar
8 La voz de Fernando Póo, October 15, 1914, p. 11.
9 Arija, p. 30. A court for adjudicating slaving cases had been established in Freetown, Sierra Leone.
10 Unzueta, Abelardo y Yuste, , Geografía histórica de la Isla de Fernando Póo (Madrid: Conséjo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, Instituto de Estudios Africanos, 1947), p. 222.Google Scholar
11 Ibid.
12 Corwin, Arthur, Spain and the Abolition of Slavery in Cuba (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967), p. 40.Google Scholar
13 Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo, Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970), p. 132.Google Scholar
14 Corwin, p. 42.
15 Hall, p. 133.
16 Unzueta, , Geografía, p. 207.Google Scholar
17 Navarro, Joaquín, Apuntes sobre el estado de la costa occidental de Africa… (Madrid: Imprenta Nacional, 1859), p. 207.Google Scholar
18 Unzueta, , Geografía, p. 209.Google Scholar
19 lbid, p. 283.
20 Holt, John, The Diary of John Holt and the Voyage of the “Maria,” edited by Holt, Cecil R. (Liverpool: Henry Young and Sons, Ltd., 1948), p. 28.Google Scholar
21 Fernández, Cristobal, Misiones y misioneros en la Guinea española (Madrid: Editorial Co. Cul. S.A., 1962), p. 46.Google Scholar
22 Yet the idea of free black emigration to Africa remained. In 1872 when the Ley Moret, partially abolishing Cuban slavery, went into effect, it gave the freedmen the choice of remaining in Cuba or returning to Africa. Corwin, , Spain, p. 275.Google Scholar
23 Moreno-Moreno, , Reseña, p. 52.Google Scholar
24 F.O.2/47, Charles Livingstone to Lord Stanley, October 18, 1866. Livingstone gives the number of arrivals as 165 (80 whites and 85 blacks). Unzueta (p. 284) and Moreno-Moreno (p. 52) give the number as 176.
25 Moreno-Moreno, , Reseña, p. 52.Google Scholar
26 Moreno-Moreno, , Reseña, p. 52.Google Scholar
27 Unzueta, p. 228.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., p. 53. In one of the ships which repatriated the Cubans, there also arrived an expedition of Spanish colonists, which included women and children. Many colonists returned to Spain in the same boat; the rest did so in the “Ferrol” on June 13 of the following year.
30 In 1873 martial law was put into effect on Fernando Po because of the Cubans still confined there; such law was not lifted until March of 1904.
In 1875 the development of Fernando Po as a penal colony was again debated; the issue was argued in a metting of La Real Academia de Ciencias Morales y Políticas. One speaker, Pedro Armegol y Cornet, warned his countrymen that to send prisoners to Fernando Po was to assign them to certain death.
Pedro Armengol y Cornet, A las islas Marianas o al Golfo de Guinea? and Lastres, Francisco y Juiz, , La colonización penitenciaria de las Marianas y Fernando Póo (Madrid: Imprenta y Libreria de Eduardo Martinez, 1878), p. 10.Google Scholar
31 At an Amsterdam exposition in 1878, tobacco cultivated by political deportees on Fernando Po won a gold medal ( Unzueta, , Geografía, p. 231 Google Scholar). In the same year the Spanish cruiser “Navarra” took back the surviving deportees, but in 1880, 267 arrived aboard the “Josefina"; between December 23, 1880 and the year 1886, 123 died and 17 escaped (Moreno-Moreno, Reseña, p. 65). A government official in an address to La Sociedad de Geografía Comercial in May of 1886 referred to Fernando Po as “Cuba Africana.” Some of the Cubans transported in the 1860's were in an expedition around the island in 1884–1886. Although penal settlement of Fernando Po was an idea which fell into desuetude in the late sixties, the republican general Villacampa was condemned to Fernando Po in 1886. However, he was transported only as far as Sierra Leone before being recalled to Spain.
32 Unzueta, , Geografía, p. 163.Google Scholar
33 Ibid., p. 57, citing Iradier, Africa Tropical, Tomo II, p. 246.
34 Hall, p. 133.