Quotes from Ada Ferrer

In a few decades, the Indigenous population in Cuba declined by perhaps as much as 95 percent.

The first recorded voyage to Havana occurred in 1572. Others followed, and by the first decade of the seventeenth century, Africans would represent almost half of Havana's population.16

Today in Cuba, a small number of people proudly claim Taíno identity.

Plantations kept growing in number and size, taking over more land and more forests, and consuming more and more African lives. What had been a society with slaves became instead a slave society, one in which the system of slavery left its mark on everything from political to social to economic to cultural life. In the process, the island of Cuba became not only a colony "equal in value to a Kingdom," but also, increasingly, the apple of the eye of a young United States.

For Adams, as for most of his fellow statesmen, the question was not whether—but when—Cuba would become part of the United States. An American Cuba was inevitable, a consequence of the most elemental law of nature: gravity.

Given the character, the mentality, the history of the people of the United States, Roosevelt actually did some wonderful things, and some of his countrymen have never forgiven him for doing them.

The welcome and support Cuba offered these and other Black radicals from the United States, however, was not extended to its own Black activists

But even when the names of Black fighters did not survive, stories of their exploits did. Half a century later, José Antonio Aponte, a free Black carpenter and the grandson of one of the Black militiamen who defended Havana against the British, painted pictures precisely of scenes like this, of Black troops taking British men prisoner, of military encampments guarded by Black soldiers. Indeed, Aponte would use those pictures to recruit Black men to a major conspiracy against slavery.

In 1905, US-owned mills in Cuba produced about 21 percent of the island's annual sugar crop. The trend accelerated over subsequent decades. By 1926, seventy-five US-owned mills produced 63 percent of the annual Cuban sugar harvest.

But two facts are clear: it is impossible to understand the Cuban Revolution without understanding Miami, and it is impossible to understand Miami without understanding the Cuban Revolution.

One by one, the remaining Spanish positions were silenced, and by two in the afternoon, the Spanish had surrendered the city.25 Havana—Key to the New World—was now British territory, part of the same empire as the thirteen colonies.

war required allies, preferably ones with deep pockets and powerful navies. To seek out such allies for the American Revolution, the recently established Continental Congress sent emissaries to Paris.

DESPITE THE INAUSPICIOUS BEGINNING OF the American Revolution's overtures to the Spanish-speaking world, Spain—the New World's oldest colonial power—opted to support the hemisphere's first anticolonial movement.

in honor of Aponte and his companions was placed there in the 1940s, though it was stolen in more recent times. Among Black communities in Havana, his memory was kept alive from generation to generation. Afro-Cuban historian José Luciano Franco recalled that in the 1960s, stories of Aponte's accomplishments—including his participation in the American Revolution—were well known in popular neighborhoods.

In the late 1850s, one Florida senator reported that US ships sailing to Angola could buy Africans for about $70 and then sell them in Cuba for almost $1,200.

Because sugar required massive amounts of labor, it was the major impetus to the transatlantic slave trade. Roughly two-thirds of the almost eleven million Africans forcibly landed in the New World ended up working in sugar.

By 1530, the Indigenous population of Hispaniola had declined by about 96 percent.

When the friar answered that the good ones did, Hatuey at once answered that he preferred hell, "so as not to be where Spaniards were.