Cuba
An island that is located in the gulf of Mexico and is 90 miles south of Florida. Cuba has been ruled by a communist dictator named Fidel Castro since 1959.
Cuba relied on slave trade longer than any other nation or colony in the Western Hemisphere. Cuba had slave trade from 1521 to the late 1870s, including the famous triangular trade. In 1868, a Creole farmer started a revolution for racial equality, freedom of speech and association. It was then a colony of Spain, which put down the insurgency after a ten-year struggle. In 1880, the Spanish Cortes approved the abolition law, which provided for an eight-year period of patronato (tutelage) for all slaves liberated according to the law. This only amounted to indentured servitude as slaves were required to spend those eight years working for their masters at no charge. On October 7, 1886, slavery was finally abolished in Cuba by a royal decree that also made the patronato illegal. [1]
By 1895 it took 200,000 Spanish soldiers to suppress the Cuban independence movement. Americans were shocked at how Spain sent tens of thousands of Cubans to concentration camps, where many died of starvation or disease.
Pressure grew in the United States for President William McKinley to intervene, and when the U.S.S. Maine mysteriously blew up in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898 (probably due to an accidental explosure), President McKinley approved this Resolution of Congress:
- Whereas the abhorrent conditions which have existed for more than three years in the island of Cuba, so near our own borders, have shocked the moral sense of the people of the United States, have been a disgrace to Christian civilization, culminating, as they have, in the destruction of a United States battle ship, with 266 of its officers and crew, while on a friendly visit in the harbor of Havana, and cannot longer be endured ...
- Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives ... That the people of the island of Cuba are and of right ought to be free.