As slave rebellion became steady warfare in parts of the French colony, substantial flows of news and rumor, liberation and enslavement continued to travel from Saint-Domingue to Cuba. Artifacts of the unfolding conflicts arrived with ship captains and refugees. Men and families who had made their living from slaves and the products they cultivated traveled to Cuba, to wait out events and rebuild fortunes on the basis of the same practices of slavery and commercial agriculture. Men, women, and children who had witnessed and become free in what was undoubtedly the event of their lifetimes were sometimes forcibly extracted and transported to Cuba, where French declarations of freedom were excesses not to be talked about, and where they would be held again as legal chattel.

If much of this movement occurred directly from island to island, a second and crucial avenue of contact between these two societies – one a collapsing, the other a burgeoning slave society – went through Saint-Domingue’s closest neighbor, the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo. The New World’s first plantation society, it had developed very differently than French Saint-Domingue. An important source of slave-grown sugar in the sixteenth century, by the turn of the nineteenth century it was largely peopled by a mixed-race peasantry, and the economy was oriented inward rather than outward toward international markets. In the 1790s, Santo Domingo, more than any other place, was often the first point of contact between revolutionary Saint-Domingue and the Spanish empire.