Cuba

Lat/Long: 21.5000, -80.0000

Cuba is an island nation in the Greater Antilles of the West Indies located north of the western portion of the Caribbean Sea. Cuba was home to the Ciboney and Taíno peoples when European began to explore the Americas in the fifteenth century. Christopher Columbus arrived in Cuba in 1492, and in 1511 Diego Velázquez began Spanish conquest of Cuba with the establishment of the settlement of Baracoa. Spanish colonizers decimated the indigenous peoples of the islands and brought enslaved Africans to the region. Cuba was briefly a British possession in 1762, but returned to Spanish control the following year and remained a Spanish colony through almost the end of the nineteenth century. From the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century the large scale cultivation of coffee and sugar grew to dominate the Cuban economy, and the number of enslaved Africans in Cuba grew in parallel. This led to several slave revolts , most notably the 1812 Aponte Rebellion, which the Spanish suppressed ruthlessly. Cuba’s economic success made it an attractive target for U.S. imperialist efforts in the antebellum period. Filibustering companies saw various degrees of success in organizing attempts to invade and claim Cuba, often playing on U.S. concerns over the protection and expansion of slavery. Cuba was also noteworthy for the attention it received from southern imperialists who sought to incorporate it into the American slaveholding economy. Several plans were made and some filibuster companies reached various stages of preparation but the only real attempt was Narciso López’s unsuccessful filibuster expeditions in 1850 and 1851. James Buchanan was one U.S. politician with designs on Cuba. As U.S. minister to Great Britain he had helped draft the “Ostend Manifesto” in 1854 that proposed U.S. seizure of Cuba, by force if necessary, and during his presidential campaign in 1856 he advocated for U.S. acquisition of Cuba. In his annual address to Congress in 1858 Buchanan again addressed strategies for acquiring Cuba. A proposal in Congress to negotiate for the purchase of Cuba was introduced early in 1859, but was defeated by Republicans opposed to the admission of Cuba to the United States as a territory where slavery was legal. Buchanan continued to propose purchasing Cuba in his subsequent annual messages but lacked sufficient Congressional support for the issue.

Merriam-Webster's Geographical Dictionary, 3rd ed., (Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 1997), 291-92; Robert E. May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), esp., 54-55, 251-58; Franklin W. Knight, Slave Society in Cuba during the nineteenth century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), 3-58, 80-81, 145-46; John M. Belohlavek, “In Defense of Doughface Diplomacy: A Reevaluation of the Foreign Policy of James Buchanan,” James Buchanan and the Coming of the Civil War, John W. Quist and Michael J. Birkner, eds. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013), 120-21