The Cuban melting pot in the late colonial period

Abstract

Between 1774, the date of the first official enumeration, and the end of the following century, the population of Cuba grew ninefold to 1.6 million, mostly because of the slave trade, and immigration from Spain. While census data offer a relatively dependable mass of data, although spare in details, vital statistics are rare and of very poor quality. The paper attempts an analysis of the factors of growth of the three major “racial” groups—the White, the Mulatto, and the Black—and of their mixing. It confirmed the commonly accepted notion of the higher mortality, and lower fertility, of the Black population (mainly slaves): its losses due to the negative natural balance were more than offset in the first phase by the inflow of slaves. But the Black population declined in the second part of the nineteenth century with the demise of the trade. The theory of the fastest growth of the Mulatto group because of the frequent intrusion of the White males in the Black reproductive pool, could not be clearly verified, although it is fully supported by the developments of the following century.