Cuban Tobacco in the Age of Second Slavery

By 1865, more than 750,000 enslaved Africans had arrived in Cuba, making it the leading Spanish American slave colony and the epicenter of slavery in the Atlantic. At the height of the global tobacco economy, tens of thousands of these slaves labored in Pinar del Río, Cuba--a region devoted exclusively to tobacco cultivation. These enslaved people were responsible for exporting a record fourteen million pounds of raw tobacco per year, leaving one contemporary writer to argue that no agricultural economy produced more value, in proportion to the capital and labor employed, than tobacco. While tobacco was second only to sugar in export significance and in the number of rural enslaved, tobacco was unequivocally as dependent on enslaved labor as the more infamous export. Despite Cuba being one of the first-introduced and last-abolished slave societies in the Atlantic world, this slave economy remains largely ignored, existing outside the considerable and recent scholarship on the region.