Cuba - Lonely Planet [12]
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Essayist and ethno-musicologist, Fernando Ortiz was a dedicated chronicler of Cuba’s African heritage who in 1955 was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his ‘love for culture and humankind.’
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The British occupation turned out to be brief but incisive. Bivouacking themselves inside Havana’s formidable city walls for 11 months, the enterprising English flung open the doors to free trade and sparked a new rush of foreign imports into the colony in the form of manufacturing parts and consumer goods. Not surprisingly, it was the sugar industry that benefited most from this economic deregulation, and in the years that followed the British handover (they swapped Havana for Florida at the Treaty of Paris in 1763) the production of sugarcane boomed like never before.
The industry got a further stimulus in the 1790s when a bloody slave rebellion on the neighboring island of Haiti led 30,000 French planters to flee west and seek asylum in Cuba (see boxed text, opposite).
By the 1820s, Cuba was the world’s largest sugar producer and the freshly inaugurated United States – hooked on sugar and spice and all things nice – was its most prestigious market. Indeed, so important was Cuban sugar to the American palate that a growing movement inside the US started petitioning the government for annexation of the island during the 19th century. In 1808 Thomas Jefferson became the first of four US presidents to offer to buy Cuba from its increasingly beleaguered Spanish owners and in 1845 President Polk upped the ante further when he slapped down a massive US$100 million bid for the jewel of the Caribbean.
For better or for worse, Spain refused to sell, preferring instead to import more slaves and bank more pesetas. By 1840 there were 400,000 slaves incarcerated on the island, the bulk of them of West African origin.
On the political front the sugar boom went some way in forestalling the formation of a coherent independence movement in Cuba before 1820. Curiously, Cuba played little part in the sweeping liberation of South America spearheaded by Simón Bolívar in the 1820s, or the independence movements in Central America starting with Miguel Hidalgo’s 1810 Grito de Dolores in Mexico, preferring instead to stay loyal to the Spanish Crown – along with Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. Nonetheless, the rumblings of discontent wouldn’t be long in coming.
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THE SPECTER OF HAITI
The legacy of Haiti, Cuba’s blighted eastern neighbor, and its bloody 1791 slave revolution loomed large over political life on the island in the 19th century and strongly redirected the course of its history.
Colonized by France in the mid-17th century, the western third of the island of Hispaniola – known formerly as Saint-Domingue – quickly prospered as a rich sugar-growing plantation economy built on an inexhaustible supply of African slaves. But, as the colony developed, the ratio between white settlers and black slaves grew dangerously disproportionate.
The spark was lit in August 1791 when, inspired by the overthrow of the ancien régime in France, thousands of slaves rose up in violent rebellion. In the space of two bloody months more than 280 sugar plantations were destroyed and 2000 white planters violently killed. In the process the rebels successfully established the new independent state of Haiti, a free republic ruled by blacks, the first of its kind in the Western hemisphere.
Watching from the sidelines 70 miles to