Captaincy General of Cuba

The Captaincy General of Cuba was the government of Spanish Cuba from 1607 until the end of Spanish rule in 1898. Created by Philip III to strengthen the defence of the Caribbean, it was run from Havana by a governor who was also the island's military commander. Over three centuries Cuba changed from a thinly peopled fortress guarding the treasure fleets into the world's leading sugar producer, an economy built on the labour of enslaved Africans.

Spain's conquest of the island was organised in 1510 by the Viceroy of the Indies, Diego Columbus, and led by Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, who governed Cuba until his death in 1524. Velázquez founded Baracoa in 1511, then Bayamo, Trinidad, Sancti Spíritus, Havana, Puerto Príncipe and Santiago de Cuba between 1513 and 1515. Once the conquest of the Aztec Empire opened richer lands on the mainland, many settlers left, and the population stayed small for two centuries. Until 1607 the island answered to the governor and audiencia (high court) of Santo Domingo. Havana grew in importance as the meeting point of the Spanish treasure fleet, and in 1565 it was from Cuba that the first permanent Spanish settlement in Florida, St Augustine, was founded.

In 1607 the island became a captaincy general of its own, part of a wider reorganisation that also created such posts elsewhere in the Caribbean and Central America; Pedro Valdés held the post first. Cuba was split into two governorships, centred on Havana and Santiago, with the governor of Havana as captain general. For the next century and a half Cuba was above all a military post, supported by a subsidy from New Spain. Refugees arrived when the English took Jamaica, and a royal shipyard opened in Havana in 1756.

During the Seven Years' War a British force took Havana in 1762 after a siege of about three months and held the west of the island for a year. Spain recovered Cuba at the peace by giving up Florida. The shock led to sweeping change from 1764, the first of the Bourbon reforms in the Americas: a new fortress, La Cabaña, was begun at Havana, military men were appointed as captains general, and an intendancy was set up in 1765 to manage finance and promote the economy. The first census, in 1774, counted about 171,600 inhabitants.

The reforms, together with Cuba's ports being opened step by step to foreign shipping, turned the island into a self-supporting exporter of sugar, coffee and tobacco. That growth depended on enslaved labour: between 1790 and 1821 some 240,000 Africans were brought to Cuba through the Atlantic slave trade, and by the mid-nineteenth century the enslaved population approached half a million. By 1830 no country produced more sugar than Cuba. Railways followed from 1837, and from 1847 Chinese contract labourers were brought in under harsh conditions. Slavery was finally abolished in 1886. Havana reached nearly 100,000 people with its surroundings by 1790.

After Spain lost its mainland colonies, the captains general received extraordinary powers in 1825. Liberal constitutions briefly gave Cuba elected local bodies, but from 1837 the island was treated as a colony governed by special laws that were never actually written. A movement for independence produced three wars: the Ten Years' War of 1868–78, the Little War of 1879–80 and the war that began in 1895. In 1897 Spain granted the island autonomy, technically ending the captaincy general, but the new government lasted only months before the Spanish–American War brought the island under United States control in 1898.

Our maps for 1650, 1700 and 1715 label the island "Cuba (Spain)".