Slavery had existed in Cuba long before the Haitian Revolution, indeed, long before Saint-Domingue had even embarked on its path as plantation power of the late eighteenth century. Yet the story of slavery in Cuba had differed significantly from that of the major slave societies of the French and British Caribbean, where in the two most productive colonies, Saint-Domingue and Jamaica, the enslaved accounted for over 85 percent of the population. There, plantations, monoculture, and slavery together formed the social and economic foundation of the colonies. In mid-century Cuba, slavery was significant, and local elites insistently called for its expansion. But in general, as Franklin Knight persuasively argued some time ago, the Spanish colony was more a society with slaves than a slave society.

That began to change gradually in the last decades of the eighteenth century. With the start of the Haitian Revolution, it changed inexorably. Cuban planters ramped up production, purchasing more and more land and mills and enslaved laborers to fill the world demand for sugar now left unfilled by Saint-Domingue. But they did significantly more than fill an abstract space created in the world market. They remade their society, profoundly transforming the economic and social life of the colony. Allied with the colonial state, they worked to expand slavery and sugar while minimizing the risks of the kind of destruction engulfing Saint-Domingue. Situated at that crossroads, Cuban planters, authorities, and the enslaved themselves felt the urgency of the moment and the place they occupied. The revolution, planters were sure, was an opportunity, a gift. But as they worked to make slavery and sugar more powerful all around them, they occasionally let themselves wonder if Saint-Domingue might not also be a harbinger of a more dangerous future that their project might help bring into being. It was with these concerns and tensions palpable, always perceptibly in the shadow of the Haitian Revolution, that the Cuban slave system was transformed at the end of the eighteenth century and functioned for much of the nineteenth.