Cuba’s Star-Spangled Slavery

[struggle4progress]

The stars and stripes, not the Confederate flag, once represented the sordid system of human slavery in Cuba.
Christopher Dickey
08.15.1512:13 AM ET

... if we want to have a better understanding of Cuba, now that it’s beginning to open up, we should remember that its troubled relations with the United States did not begin with Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959 or even Teddy Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill. We should understand that for many years the American flag—not the Confederate flag—was, for Cubans, the star-spangled banner of slavery.

Early in the 19th century, Great Britain, the United States, and most of the governments of Europe had passed laws banning the horrific slave trade between Africa and the Americas. The British, who finally emancipated the slaves in their colonies in 1833, moved not only to end their own previously extensive participation in the trade in humans, but to prevent others from carrying out that grim commerce as well. They deployed warships off the coast of Africa and South America to stop, search, and seize suspected slavers, and they used gunship diplomacy more than once to impose their will on weaker nations.

But the United States had gone to war against Britain in 1812 to stop it from stopping and searching any American ships, and steadfastly refused to let the British anti-slaving fleet stop American-flag vessels. Instead, Washington deployed its own feeble squadron off the coast of Africa which did little to stop slavers and much to interfere with the British efforts to do so.

The main market for the slaves—tens of thousands of them every year— was the Spanish colony of Cuba, where it was more profitable to work them to death in the cane fields and then replace them with new, cheaply bought Africans, than it was to keep them healthy and alive. Technically, it was illegal to import them, but the law was ignored ...

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/15/cuba-s-star-spangled-slavery.html

[Igel]

1. Stange article.

The British ships were stopping US ships and that led to the war of 1812. But they were also pressing their former subjects into service. Meaning they'd board a ship, take some men, and say, "You're British sailors now."

The local of the pitifully small US Navy wasn't an accident. And it was northern Africa, not a big source of slaves, that saw their presence. Because the Barbary Wars had recently been fought--the reason for the Navy in the first place. The pirates there were waging, as they put it, jihad, and taking among others Americans as captives and slaves. A practice that had gone back decades. The treaties were to stop it, and mostly did. But there were still renegade slavers.

Cuba wasn't free. It was still Spanish. And the Spanish and Portuguese slavers until the 1830s, officially, and later, unofficially. In fact, their slave trade each during those decades exceeded the US trade by a wide margin. Cuba only officially disposed of the slave trade after the US Civil War started.

The reason the article is strange is because of what's left out. It has a single narrative that the writer wants us to believe, and because it's devoid of context because of our ignorance and desire to be the Great Satan (or say that we're the Great Satan, but not us personally, but these others that now are us and now are our domestic enemy) the true narrative swells from a sideline of history to the main event. We become responsible for Cuba--a colony of another empire, with larger slave trade, legalized slave trade. Our smaller trade becomes the trade. Our Navy becomes repurposed from preventing enslaving Americans to having as its goal the enslavement of others. The War of 1812 goes from having the British just stopping US ships for all sorts of reasons and kidnapping Americans to preventing us, as a benevolent big brother, from committing our original sin. An exceptional act becomes the behavioral norm. Truth with the goal of misleading. Never a good thing.

[struggle4progress]

2. I'm not a professional historian. It is, however, true that the slave trade continued to import

some persons into the US after this became illegal, with some of the richest slave-holders finding ways to evade the law. The interesting Echo/Dolphin story also seems to be true: