1820 Legal slave trade into Cuba abolished by terms of 1817 treaty with England. 1886 Slavery abolished in Cuba. Responding to rife piracy near Cuba and Puerto Rico as competing royalist and revolutionary Latin American privateers fight for control over Caribbean commerce, the U.S. Navy establishes a West India Squadron. The mosquito fleet patrols the inlets of the Cuban coast, cleaning out pirates. The Spanish government proclaims free any slave managing to prove he had been illegally imported, and implements new regulations requiring captains of vessels arriving from Africa to turn their logbooks over to port authorities to be inspected for evidence of illegal slaving.
British officials complain that the new measures are paper-thin.
A slave revolt breaks out in the British colony of Jamaica, which is brutally repressed by colonial authorities. In a trade war between the U.S. and Spain, both nations raise duties and restrict imports, strangling the Cuban carrying trade. The Anglo-Spanish agreement on the slave trade is renewed with tightened enforcement. British cruisers are authorized to arrest suspected Spanish slavers and bring them before mixed commissions established at Sierra Leone and Havana. Spain appoints a consul in Jamaica, to report on abolitionist activity there.