9781422279809

This illustration from a nineteenth-century book shows the crowded conditions that West Africans faced below the decks of the slave ships that carried them to Cuba. Most of the African-American slaves brought to Cuba arrived during the nineteenth century.

in other areas. Sugar made Cuban planters extremely wealthy, and they clamored for more and more slave labor to work their expanding plantations. About 85 percent of all the slaves ever brought to Cuba—estimated at up to 1.3 million—arrived after 1800. The enslaved people represented a wide array of African groups. There were Yoruba from what are today Benin and Nigeria. There were Igbo from Biafra. There were Mandinka from Sierra Leone, Bantu from Angola, and Akan from Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. These and other groups retained major ele-

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The Culture and People of Cuba