This dissertation discusses the creation and expansion of the Cuban-based transatlantic slave trading infrastructure at the turn of the nineteenth century. Since the beginning of the conquest of the Americas, foreigners such as the Portuguese, Dutch, British, and Americans controlled the provision of captives to the Spanish colonies under a Spanish state-controlled system known as Asientos. Such dependency was challenged in the 1790s when a combination of international events, favorable colonial legislation, and a restructuring of the colonial economy turned Cuba into an expanding sugar plantation economy based on African forced labor. By the 1820s, in just three decades, Cuban merchants had effectively overcome that external dependency by setting up the conditions for trading slaves on the African coast. This thesis argues that foreign slavers trading in the island since the 1790s were pivotal in training the first generation of Cuban slave ship captains, providing a slave merchant fleet to Cubans, and introducing Cuban merchants to African slave trading networks. In order to illustrate the establishment of Cuban operations in Africa, this dissertation focuses on the creation of a slave-trading corridor between Havana and Rio Pongo, Guinea-Conakry. Cuban merchants, I argue, reached the region known as Rio Pongo as a result of the U.S. slave traders who moved their operations to Cuba after 1808. The expansion of the slave trade in Rio Pongo to supply the expanding Cuban demand had also an impact on that coastal African society.
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