Cuba: Colonial Period

Spanish colonization of Cuba began in earnest in 1511, when Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar led an expedition that established the island's first permanent settlements. Havana, founded a few years later, grew into a major transit port for Spanish fleets sailing between the Americas and Europe, owing to its sheltered harbor. Cuba remained under Spanish administration for nearly four centuries, governed initially as part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain and later, from 1774, as a separate Captaincy General.

Tobacco cultivation dominated the island's early colonial economy, but sugar increasingly displaced it during the eighteenth century as global demand grew and planters expanded production. The shift relied heavily on enslaved labor brought from Africa: the enslaved population rose from roughly 39,000 in the 1770s to around 400,000 by the 1840s, close to a third of the island's total population. By the mid-nineteenth century sugar accounted for the large majority of Cuba's exports, and the island had become one of the world's leading sugar producers.

Cuba was among the last territories in the Americas to abolish slavery, formally ending its participation in the transatlantic slave trade in 1867 and outlawing slavery itself in 1886. Spanish rule continued until the close of the nineteenth century, when the Spanish-American War brought Spain's nearly four-hundred-year presence on the island to an end.