Following the Taino genocide in which the Spanish bred out or killed majority of the native population, the Spanish were in need of new slaves to uphold their sugarcane production. They thus brought more than a million enslaved African people to Cuba.
It is estimated that over 600,000 Africans were taken from West Africa and shipped to Cuba over three centuries, with tens of thousands dying during the brutal Atlantic Crossing. Most of these people were brought to Cuba between the 1780s and the 1860s, as the slave population rose from 39,000 to 400,000.
From the 1500s, Spanish colonizers brought about 8,000 Africans, largely from West Africa, to Cuba as slaves, to work the sugar plantations. By 1838, at their peak, there were nearly 400,000 slaves on the island. As their numbers increased, so did the tons of sugar Cuba produced.
Cuba participated heavily in the slave trade to obtain cheap labor for the sugar plantations beginning in the 16th century. Cuba stopped officially participating in the slave trade in 1867 but the institution of slavery was not abolished on the island until 1886.
The Portuguese, in the 16th century, were the first to buy slaves from West African slavers and transport them across the Atlantic. In 1526, they completed the first transatlantic slave voyage to Brazil, and other Europeans soon followed.
Jamaicans are the citizens of Jamaica and their descendants in the Jamaican diaspora. The vast majority of Jamaicans are of Sub-Saharan African descent, with minorities of Europeans, East Indians, Chinese, Middle Eastern, and others of mixed ancestry.
Well over 90 percent of enslaved Africans were sent to the Caribbean and South America. Only about 6 percent of African captives were sent directly to British North America. Yet by 1825, the US population included about one-quarter of the people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere.
Slavery in Cuba was a portion of the larger Atlantic Slave Trade that primarily supported Spanish plantation owners engaged in the sugarcane trade. It was practised on the island of Cuba from the 16th century until it was abolished by Spanish royal decree on October 7, 1886.
The oldest known slave society was the Mesopotamian and Sumerian civilisations located in the Iran/Iraq region between 6000-2000BCE.
The ancestry of Cuban Americans is primarily from Spaniards and Africans, as well as more distant ancestry from among the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and those of Florida.
An autosomal study from 2014 found the genetic ancestry in Cuba to be 72% European, 20% African and 8% Amerindian.
Most African population arrived in New Spain as slaves, where they were used for heavy labor. Because of the reduction in number of the indigenous population, primarily due to infectious disease, but also warfare and social disruption, Europeans took millions of people from Africa to be used as enslaved laborers.
The original inhabitants of Cuba were the indigenous Ciboney and other Arawak speaking groups.
In the 19th century Cuba imported more than 600,000 African slaves, most of whom arrived after 1820, the date that Spain and Great Britain had agreed would mark the end of slave trading in the Spanish colonies.
The first larger group of slaves (300) arrive in Cuba in 1520. The first Catholic mass is celebrated in Havana, under a Ceiba tree. Seven years after the first small group of African slaves were kidnapped into Cuba, the first large group of African slaves, 300 total, are brought to work the gold mines.
Although only about 150 native Chinese live in Cuba today, in the mid-1800s, there were more than 100,000, nearly all of them men. They were brought to Cuba as indentured laborers, enticed by worthless contracts that promised them freedom after eight years. Many died on sugar plantations not long after arriving.
Slavery in Australia has existed in various forms from colonisation in 1788 to the present day. European settlement relied heavily on convicts, sent to Australia as punishment for crimes and forced into labour and often leased to private individuals.
Prince Infante D. Henrique began selling African slaves in Lagos in 1444. In 1455, Pope Nicholas V gave Portugal the rights to continue the slave trade in West Africa, under the provision that they convert all people who are enslaved. The Portuguese soon expanded their trade along the whole west coast of Africa.
Cuba is a multiracial society with a population of mainly Spanish and African origins. The largest organized religion is the Roman Catholic Church.
Cespedes, who was a plantation owner in Cuba, freed his slaves and made the declaration of Cuban independence in 1868 which started the Ten Years' War (1868–1878).
The results had long-term repercussions: Cuba became the largest slave colony in all of Hispanic America, with the highest number of enslaved persons imported and the longest duration of the illegal slave trade. About 800,000 slaves were imported to Cuba—twice as many as those shipped to the United States.
Slavery in the Sahel states of Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad and Sudan in particular, continues a centuries-old pattern of hereditary servitude. Other forms of traditional slavery exist in parts of Ghana, Benin, Togo and Nigeria.
Most Jamaican slaves came from the region of modern day Ghana, Nigeria and Central Africa, and included the Akan, Ashanti, Yoruba, Ibo and Ibibio peoples.
In the first century of trading over 900,000 (52%) of all Africans leaving the continent came from West Central Africa.