“Cuba Africana”: Cuba and Spain in the Bight of Biafra, 1839-1869

Abstract

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.