page_title: History of Cuba
section_title: Antislavery and independence movements
hierarchical_section_title: History of Cuba / The 19th century: Years of upheaval / Antislavery and independence movements
caption_attribution_description: Español: La Habana, entrada triunfal del Arsenio Martínez Campos, el 14 de junio de 1878, tras el final de la Guerra de los Diez Años, croquis al natural de Víctor Patricio de Landaluce, dibujo de Juan Comba García, recogido en la revista española La Ilustración Española y Americana.
context_page_description: The history of Cuba is characterized by dependence on outside powers—Spain, the US, and the USSR. The island of Cuba was inhabited by various Amerindian cultures prior to the arrival of the Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus in 1492. After his arrival on a Spanish expedition, Spain conquered Cuba and appointed Spanish governors to rule in Havana. The administrators in Cuba were subject to the Viceroy of New Spain and the local authorities in Hispaniola. In 1762–63, Havana was briefly occupied by Great Britain, before being returned to Spain in exchange for Florida. A series of rebellions during the 19th century failed to end Spanish rule and claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Cubans. However, the Spanish–American War resulted in a Spanish withdrawal from the island in 1898, and following three-and-a-half years of subsequent US military rule, Cuba gained formal independence in 1902.
context_section_description: In 1826, the first armed uprising for independence took place in Puerto Príncipe (Camagüey Province), led by Francisco de Agüero and Andrés Manuel Sánchez. Agüero, a white man, and Sánchez, a mulatto, were both executed, becoming the first popular martyrs of the Cuban independence movement.
  The 1830s also saw a surge of activity from the reformist movement, whose main leader was José Antonio Saco, standing out for his criticism of Spanish despotism and the slave trade. Nevertheless, this surge bore no fruit; Cubans remained deprived of the right to send representatives to the Spanish parliament, and Madrid stepped up repression.
  Nonetheless, Spain had long been under pressure to end the slave trade. In 1817, it signed a first treaty, to which it did not adhere. With the abolition of slavery altogether in their colonies, the British forced Spain to sign another treaty in 1835. In this context, black revolts in Cuba increased, and were put down with mass executions. One of the most significant was the Conspiración de La Escalera (Ladder Conspiracy), which started in March 1843 and continued until 1844. The conspiracy took its name from a torture method, in which blacks were tied to a ladder and whipped until they confessed or died. The Ladder Conspiracy involved free blacks and slaves, as well as white intellectuals and professionals. It is estimated that 300 blacks and mulattos died from torture, 78 were executed, over 600 were imprisoned and over 400 expelled from the island. (See comments in new translation of Villaverde's "Cecilia Valdés".) Among the executed was the leading poet Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés, now commonly known as "Plácido". José Antonio Saco, one of Cuba's most prominent thinkers, was expelled from Cuba.
  Following the 1868–1878 rebellion of the Ten Years' War, all slavery was abolished by 1886, making Cuba the second-to-last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, with Brazil being the last. Instead of blacks, slave traders looked for others sources of cheap labour, such as Chinese colonists and Indians from Yucatán. Another feature of the population was the number of Spanish-born colonists, known as peninsulares, who were mostly adult males; they constituted between ten and twenty per cent of the population between the middle of the 19th century and the great depression of the 1930s.
caption: Spanish General Arsenio Martínez Campos in Havana, Colonial Cuba, 1878
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