Cuban planters rushed in to fill the void left by Saint-Domingue’s revolution as if it had been created just for them. But as they worked to expand slavery, the context in which they did so required them always to ponder the possibility of its destruction at the hands of the enslaved. The planters understood that the chaos that now promised to grant them so much economic power had been brought into being by the actions of enslaved men and women just like the ones who were now arriving on Cuban shores in unprecedented numbers. For them and for the people they enslaved, the example of black revolution was not an abstract proposition, but a palpable presence. In Cuba, news, people, and papers from revolutionary Saint-Domingue arrived quickly and vividly. And so as the brutal regime of plantation slavery took root at the turn of Cuba’s nineteenth century, stories of black liberation sprouted on that same ground. The proximity of the Haitian Revolution and the ease of contact and communication between revolutionary Saint-Domingue and colonial Cuba made the planters’ project of emulating Saint-Domingue and containing would-be Haiti significantly more complicated in practice than in conception.

The Circulation of Revolutionary News

First word of the unforeseen upheaval in Le Cap arrived in Cuba at its easternmost city of Baracoa. Poor, sparsely populated, and surrounded by mountain ranges and water, Baracoa was worlds removed from the plantation society emerging in Havana’s hinterland. Founded by Diego Velázquez in 1511 as the first Spanish settlement in Cuba, Baracoa was not of the new Cuba being transformed by sugar and slavery, but of an older Cuba of petty contraband, small settled peasantries, and undeveloped interiors. On a clear day, however, its mountains were visible across fifty miles of sea from Môle Saint-Nicolas in the enviably modern colony of French Saint-Domingue. Easily reachable even from the capital city of Le Cap, Baracoa functioned as Cuba’s maritime frontier with the Haitian Revolution.