The Emancipation Process In Cuba

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The Caribbean colonies of Spain have a history that dates back the year 1501. In these colonies the slaves would provide manual Labour of hard nature in both the mines and sugar cane plantations. However the practice was put to a halt in 1821 when Spain banned the practice of slavery officially. A series of discreet legal and political tensions provide the plat form for the examination of the abolition of slavery in the Cuba. These tend to draw critical debates in relation to the motivation and general pressure behind the overall events of the emancipation process in Cuba. Some theories contend that the emancipation process is a result of the international pressure exerted on the Spanish government where as in other circles it’s generally…show more content…
Its importance is crucial as it provides a spring board for proper assessment of the political as well as the legal dynamics that underlay this whole process. The structures of slavery in Cuba underwent a gradual dismantling and were eventually piece by piece rendered insignificant. This led to so many of both the older category as well as the young children held as captives in this bondage finally being allowed there freedom . The process of change must be noted that was not a plain sailing as the resistance that it faced was extremely complex. This ranged from resistance from both sections including the slave master as well as the slaves themselves given the social and economic structures involved. However it should be noted that these challenges only served to enhance and shape the course of the emancipation process. The fight against slavery in Cuba reached maximum when the eastern department in (October 1868) comprising of small group of the small scale planters rioted. Their action was instigated after increasingly getting disillusioned with the manner of management of the metropolitan by the Spanish. They retaliated by deciding to free up the slaves and instead incorporate them as rebel groups. Such factors including economic hardships as well as heavy and unrealistic taxes as levied by the Spanish…show more content…
It’s also true that the Colonist heavily relied on indigenous labor in the initial phases of the settlement. This was aimed at maintaining the flow of the economy with a major focus of advancing the subsistence economy. The native populations were the primary target for the provision of the hard Labour and were always captured by Portuguese through there Jesuit expeditions they referred to as the bandeiras. The growth of the sugar economy in Brazil can be attributed to Slave labor and because of the boom in the sugar production; sugar became the primary export of the colony from 1600 to 1650. The struggle for emancipation in Brazil lagged behind as it was the last colony in the western world to embrace emancipation .Slavery in Brazil was abolished in 1888 at a time where over four million salves had been brought in from Africa to Brazil, (Davis,
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