A Havana carpenter uses portraits of black rulers to recruit rebels

Soon after Henri Christophe was crowned in the north of Haiti in 1811, the free black carpenter Jose Antonio Aponte began a conspiracy in Havana and drew pictures of revolutionary leaders as a way of raising consciousness among those he approached. Geggus places the episode in a longer Cuban sequence. Five years earlier enslaved people on plantations near Havana had planned to take the city's forts so they could be free as those in Saint-Domingue were and become masters of the land, and in 1796 Africans planning a revolt in Spanish Santo Domingo went for advice to Saint-Domingue insurgents settled nearby. In several of these cases the promise of Haitian help was a morale device rather than a fact, and in Aponte's plot a free black man went so far as to impersonate the Saint-Domingue leader Jean-Francois.

Napoleon put his brother on the Spanish throne, and Spanish Cuba turned on the French who had settled there after fleeing Saint-Domingue. A proclamation of 12 March 1809 expelled every one of them who had no Spanish spouse and had not asked for naturalisation. The first boat reached Louisiana on 12 May. By January 1810 at least 9,059 recorded people had arrived there from Cuba, most of them out of Santiago and Baracoa, with only one ship sailing from Havana. The mayor of New Orleans counted 2,731 whites, 3,102 free people of colour and 3,226 slaves, so the wave divided almost evenly into thirds. New Orleans parish had held 17,001 people before they landed. The arrivals raised its white population by forty three per cent, its slave population by thirty eight per cent, and its free population of colour by one hundred and thirty four per cent. Later arrivals brought the total to roughly ten thousand inside nine months.

After the murder of Dessalines in 1806 Haiti split in two. Henry Christophe, born in Grenada, ruled the north with a coercive labour regime built on Toussaint's model. Alexandre Petion ran a republic in the south and west with a reputation for letting things be. The difference showed in what each did with state land. In the north the state leased its estates to dignitaries and generals. In the south it distributed them as private property, though officers and senior officials still took the largest share, and sharecropping settled in as the normal arrangement on holdings carved into two, three or five carreaux. Large estates, military strongmen and a labour code survived in both halves. Petion's lighter touch came from weakness, since he never held his generals the way Christophe held his. In 1810 Rigaud raised the south as a separate state, and it lasted until his successor rejoined Petion in 1812.

People fleeing the war in Saint-Domingue landed in the Spanish province of Santiago de Cuba and brought a crop with them. In 1800 the whole island of Cuba carried about sixty coffee plantations. In 1803 the province had eight worth listing. During 1804 alone another 54 were established, holding more than half a million plants. The district of Dos Bocas went from 73,000 plants before 1803 to 305,000 in 1804, then 362,000, 289,000 and 162,000 over the following three years. Guanian rose from 10,000 plants in 1803 to 538,000 in 1807. Before the refugees arrived the provincial harvest had never reached 8,000 arrobes. By 1805 it was 80,000, and 300,000 in the years after. Governor Kindelan reckoned the province harvested 10,000 quintals in 1807, twice that the next year, at least 30,000 by 1809, and looked for 40,000 in 1810. Land, houses and enslaved people were advertised for sale payable in coffee.