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“Cuba Africana”: Cuba and Spain in the Bight of Biafra, 1839-1869
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2015
Extract
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.
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- Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1977
References
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.
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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.
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