Consequences

Chapter 6 links the Aponte slave rebellion in Cuba, which took place fifty years after the siege of Havana, with the wide-ranging impacts of the British invasion and occupation. After Spain regained Havana, Spain took unprecedented measures to promote transatlantic human trafficking, including the annexation in 1778 of what would become its only sub-Saharan African colony, Equatorial Guinea, as well as the tightening of ties to the Spanish Philippines, which was seen as an essential source of goods for exchange in the slave trade. Its Enlightenment-inspired reforms also included new efforts to promote the military service of Spain’s black subjects in both Cuba and greater Spanish America. In the decades that followed the Seven Years’ War, the men of African descent who had defended Cuba from British attack in 1762 sought the continuation and expansion of their many roles buttressing Spanish colonialism; however, white elites in Havana wanted new departures in Spanish imperial political economy and persuaded policymakers in Madrid to grant them. Their efforts remade the political economy of the island, more severely restricted the traditional privileges of free black soldiers and all people of African descent, and ultimately contributed to the outbreak of the Aponte Rebellion.

“La dominación inglesa”

Chapter 4 focuses on Havana elites during the city’s eleven-month occupation by British forces. Eager to trade for goods and enslaved Africans with their frequent commercial partners, Havana’s elite residents ended up betraying those who had fought so hard to ward off the British attack. During the occupation, they cozied up to the British commander Lord Albemarle and seized commercial opportunities in the hybrid space they so often occupied, where layers of British and Spanish empire overlapped. Ultimately, Albemarle’s army was too weak and his governing practices were too corrupt for the occupation to have a lasting economic impact on Havana, but in the meantime the city’s leading merchants and landowners managed to shape the period of British rule to their own advantage.

Introduction

The introduction sketches the contours of the British six-week invasion and eleven-month occupation of Havana in 1762–1763, a major event in the history of the Atlantic world. It describes the framework of the book, “an event history” that relies on multiple, overlapping temporal and spatial frames in order to tie together many different strands of history, historical actors, perspectives, and scales. In giving a long-term history of the causes, central dynamics, and enduring consequences of this event, the book focuses on the crucial role of the slave trade and people of African descent. The actions of people of African descent and imperial rivalry over the slave trade shaped both the invasion and occupation of Havana in ways yet to be fully understood. The rest of the book explores the painful irony that black soldiers’ brave service in Havana during the British siege helped lead to new Spanish policies that endorsed and expanded slavery and the slave trade.

Havana at the Crossroads

Chapter 2 casts a “Havana’s-eye view” on the way its residents positioned themselves inside and outside both the British and Spanish empires during the decades that preceded the British invasion. Well before the British war fleet began its siege of Havana, contraband and the British-dominated slave trade had already transformed the city into a hybrid space, mutually constituted with its British American neighbors. The African peoples brought to Cuba in predominantly British slaving ships were bought and sold as goods, yet, upon arrival, they and their descendants were also regarded as future loyal Spanish subjects, vital economic contributors, and crucial defenders of the king’s realms in a climate of heightened imperial war and rivalry. Havana’s merchants and landowners built a successful economy that profited from both trading with the enemy and making war against them through privateering and wartime transimperial trade. The prevailing patterns of war, trade, and slavery help to explain the reactions of individuals in Havana to the British siege and occupation of their city.

Imagining the Conquest

Chapter 1 gives a history of British expansion into Caribbean waters claimed by Spain and developing conflict over commercial access to and political control over the island of Cuba. A deep-seated obsession with capturing Havana developed as early as the sixteenth century, during these years of English and later British advance. In the early eighteenth century, the British-dominated slave trade to Spanish America and the contraband traffic that accompanied it led to conflicts with Spain that precipitated a cycle of wars. The Spanish monarchy sought exclusive political and commercial control over its overseas territories, yet, to its dismay, the local dynamics of these wars led to even more regional autonomy and integration for its overseas possessions. Through a cycle of eighteenth-century wars targeting Spanish America, British subjects developed closer commercial ties with Havana, and British commanders gained better knowledge of how to attack the city with each failed attempt.

Spanish Reoccupation

The final section of the book moves across the fifty years after the occupation, exploring Spain’s efforts to reconstitute its authority in Havana and the many reverberations of the occupation throughout broader Atlantic and global systems. The actions of individuals in Cuba during this crucial episode of fighting and occupying revised understandings in the metropole that would go on to shape new policies with global ramifications. The exemplary service of black soldiers in defending Cuba from attack helped to convince the Spanish state of the “utility” of Africans for achieving its imperial ambitions and the wisdom of procuring, on its own, more populations of African descent for its overseas colonies. In addition, disloyalty among elites during the occupation convinced Spain that the way to tie the island better to its sovereign was to make more enslaved Africans available to these eager buyers.

A City under Siege

This middle section of the book, on the invasion and occupation, treats the two phases of the central events in Cuba as separate but parallel processes, with their own protagonists and outcomes. Chapter 3 focuses on the critical role of people of African descent during the siege. British war commanders had counted on a formidable defense of Havana from the Spanish soldiers stationed there, but what surprised them was the vigorous part played by free and enslaved people of color on the front lines of the defense. Not all people of African descent present at the siege acted in support of either the British or the Spanish war effort. But in general blacks in Havana made the siege so protracted that the British almost failed; its armies ended up losing more men to a virulent yellow fever outbreak than they had in the entire Seven Years’ War in North America. The defense of Havana was so fierce that it took down a massive British army and severely limited plans for the occupation.

Conclusion

The conclusion explores the way the invasion and occupation of Havana has been remembered in Cuba, Spain, Britain, and the United States during the 250 years since these events transpired. In general, the role of people of African descent, the institution of racial slavery, and imperial rivalry over the slave trade has been whitewashed or left out of the story. In Spain and Cuba, nationalistic readings of the event have stressed the loyalty of people in Cuba to either Spanish empire or a burgeoning sense of Cuban patria. In Britain the event has virtually been forgotten, a history that went nowhere, other than to prove the strength of British arms. Instead, the obsession with capturing and controlling Cuba gained a second life in the United States. It influenced U.S. intervention in the Spanish-American-Cuban war in the nineteenth century and continues to haunt U.S.-Cuban relations to this day.