1515 to 1790 · Datasetspan
For most of three centuries Cuba's captives came from West Central Africa
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Cuba is remembered as a nineteenth century sugar colony, which makes the trade that supplied it before then easy to overlook. From 1515 to 1790 the volume stayed modest by later standards, tens of thousands rather than the hundreds of thousands that arrived afterwards. The origins are consistent. More than forty percent of the captives embarked in West Central Africa, the coast of what is now Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a region that sent more people into the Atlantic than any other. Spanish and Portuguese merchants ran the traffic at first, working under crown contracts. British traders took a large share during the eighteenth century, helped by the ten months they held Havana in 1762 and 1763, when the port was thrown open and thousands of Africans were landed in a single year. The labour of these early arrivals went into tobacco, cattle and the first Cuban sugar mills, on which the later boom was built.
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