A friar tells the colonists of Santo Domingo they are in mortal sin

In Advent of 1511 the Dominican friar Anton de Montesinos preached in Santo Domingo to a congregation that included the colony's officials and the largest holders of encomienda grants. He told them that the treatment of the Taino, the forced labour in the mines, the hunger, the killing, put every man in the room in a state of mortal sin, and he asked by what right they held these people in servitude. The colonists complained to the crown and the Dominicans were ordered to retract. They refused. The sermon produced the Laws of Burgos the following year, the first Spanish legislation attempting to regulate the treatment of indigenous people and largely ignored in practice. It also produced Bartolome de las Casas, an encomienda holder in the audience who gave up his grant and spent fifty years arguing the case. The long argument about whether conquered peoples hold rights that bind their conquerors starts in that church.

A letter of 1512 describes how Dom Afonso, king of the Kongo, won one of the civil wars of his reign after calling on Saint James. The men who escaped said afterward that at the moment of the invocation they saw a white cross above a crowd of armed horsemen, and that the sight left them unable to do anything except run. Afonso turned the victory into an institution. He merged the yearly military ceremony that commemorated his seizure of power with the church feast of Saint James on 25 July, so that the parade of the king's soldiers and the celebration of the saint became a single event. In Haiti today, pilgrims reach Plaine du Nord three days before the same feast and hold ceremonies at a muddy pit for Ogou around the clock until the mass begins, at which point most of them leave for the festival of Saint Anne at Limonade.

Diego Velazquez de Cuellar landed in eastern Cuba in 1511 with a few hundred men to take the island for Spain. The resistance he met was led by Hatuey, a cacique who had crossed from Hispaniola with several hundred followers rather than live under the encomienda. Hatuey had watched what the Spanish did on his own island and warned the Cubans what was coming. He fought a guerrilla campaign in the eastern hills for some months, was captured, and was burned at the stake. The execution was meant to finish the war, and in the short run it did, since Cuba was under Spanish control within three years. Hatuey became something else. Cuban writers made him the first man to fight an invasion on Cuban soil, and he now stands in bronze and appears on the label of a beer. The mechanism is worth keeping. News about the Spanish moved between islands ahead of their ships, carried by the people escaping them.

In 1510 the Spanish crown authorised the shipment of enslaved Africans to Hispaniola and the first of them came ashore. The reason was arithmetic. Colonists had been extracting gold and food from the island using Taino labour under the encomienda system, and the Taino were dying, from overwork, from hunger when their fields went untended, and from smallpox and other diseases against which they had no immunity. The colony's output depended on bodies it no longer had. Africa offered a supply that could be bought and shipped, and Portugal already held the trading posts and the vessels. That decision stood for nearly three hundred years. It moved more than ten million people alive across the Atlantic, and it built the sugar economy that made the western third of this island the most valuable colony in the world. It also assembled, on the same ground, the population that abolished slavery there by force in 1793 and founded Haiti in 1804.