Slavery's evolution in colonial Cuba prior to the eighteenth century was conditioned by the diversity of the island's urban and rural regions. No one economic activity defined the slave experience, nor was there any great concentration of Africans and their descendants in any Cuban region other than in the city of Havana. Slaves labored in all occupations and were part of a broader Afro-Cuban culture which included an ever-increasing community of free blacks and mulattoes. Export agriculture was small-scale during the early centuries of colonial rule and not the engine of economic growth that it would become during the second half of the eighteenth century. Although agricultural demand for slave labor should not be minimized, urban occupations utilized significantly more slaves before 1750. The slave trade was sporadic, and the Crown's insistence on maintaining mercantilist monopolies in the form oi asientos limited the number of slave arrivals to Cuba.

This panorama would all change decisively during the eighteenth century. Cuba could not remain immune to the pulls of European demand for tropical staple products which could only be produced by African slave labor owing to the absence of any internal free labor market. The English transformation of Barbados into a slave/sugar colony, their seizure of Jamaica in the mid-seventeenth century for the same purposes, the establishment of French Saint Domingue so close, and the onset of commercial contacts with British North America had a profound impact on both the attitudes and activities of Cuba's colonial elite.