II.

Latin America and the Caribbean

The Latin American and Caribbean regions were the first areas of the Americas to be populated by African immigrants and the majority of their descendants still live in those regions.

A.

Early Immigration and Slavery

Most of the earliest black immigrants to the Americas were indigenous to Spain or Portugal: men such as Pedro Alonso Niño, a navigator who accompanied Columbus on his first voyage, and the black colonists who helped Nicolás de Ovando form the first Spanish settlement on Hispaniola in 1502. The name of Nuflo de Olano appears in the records as that of a black slave present when Vasco Núñez de Balboa sighted the Pacific Ocean in 1513. Other blacks served with Hernán Cortés when he conquered Mexico (1519-1521) and with Francisco Pizarro when he marched into Peru (1532).

A.1.

Iberian Blacks

Estebanico, one of the survivors of the unfortunate expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez to Florida in 1527, was a black. With three companions, he spent eight years travelling overland to Mexico City, learning several Native American languages in the process. Later, while exploring what is now New Mexico, United States, he lost his life in a dispute with the Zuñi people.

Juan Valiente, another black, led Spaniards in a series of battles between 1540 and 1546 against the Araucanian people of Chile. Although Valiente was a slave, he was rewarded with an estate near Santiago, Chile, and control of several Native American villages.

Between 1502 and 1518, Spain shipped out hundreds of Spanish-born Africans, called Ladinos, to work as labourers, especially in the mines. Opponents of their enslavement cited weak Christian faith and a penchant for escaping to the mountains or joining the Native Americans in revolt. Proponents declared that the rapid diminution of the Native American population required a constant supply of reliable labourers. Free Spaniards were reluctant to do manual labour or to remain settled (especially after the discovery of gold on the mainland), and only slave labour could assure the economic viability of the colonies.

A.2.

Beginning of the African Slave Trade

By 1518, the demand for slaves in the Spanish New World was so great that King Charles I of Spain sanctioned the direct transport of slaves from Africa to the American colonies. The slave trade was controlled by the Crown, which sold the right to import slaves (Spanish, asiento, contract) to entrepreneurs.

By the 1530s, the Portuguese were also using African slaves in Brazil. From then until the abolition of the slave trade in 1870, at least 10 million Africans were forcibly brought to the Americas: about 47 per cent of them to the Caribbean islands and the Guianas; 38 per cent to Brazil; and 6 per cent to mainland Spanish America. About 4.5 per cent went to North America, roughly the same proportion that went to Europe.

The greatest proportion of these slaves worked on plantations producing sugar, coffee, cotton, tobacco, and rice in the tropical lowlands of north-eastern Brazil and in the Caribbean islands. Most of them came from the sub-Saharan states of West and Central Africa, but by the late 18th century the supply zone extended to southern and East Africa as well.

A.3.

Impact of Slavery

Slavery in the Americas was generally harsh, but it varied from time to time and place to place. The Caribbean and Brazilian sugar plantations required a consistently large supply of labour for centuries. In Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia, and the frontiers of southern Brazil, slavery played a relatively unimportant role in the economies of these regions.

To tame the wilderness, build cities, establish plantations, and exploit mineral wealth, the Europeans needed more labourers than they could recruit from their countries of origin. In the early 16th century, the Spanish tried unsuccessfully to subjugate and enslave the indigenous populations of the Caribbean islands. Slavery was considered the most desirable system of labour organization because it allowed the master almost absolute control over the life and productivity of the labourer. The labour situation was exacerbated by the rapid disintegration of local indigenous societies and the subsequent decimation of the indigenous peoples by warfare and European diseases, thus increasing the demand for imported workers.

African slaves constituted the highest proportion of labourers on the islands and around the Caribbean lowlands where the indigenous population had died. The same was true in the north-eastern coastlands of Brazil, especially in the rich agricultural area of the Reconcavo, where the seminomadic Tupinamba and Tupiniquim peoples resisted effective control by the Portuguese, and in some of the Leeward Islands such as Guadeloupe and Dominica, where the Caribs waged a determined resistance against their expulsion and enslavement. In areas of previously dense populations, such as parts of central Mexico or the highlands of Peru, a sufficient number of the Native American inhabitants survived to supply much of the demand for labour by new colonists. In such cases African slaves supplemented the Native Americans coerced into labour.

A.4.

Volume of Immigration

In New Spain (modern Mexico), the principal economic activity for the colonists in the early colonial period was mining. African slaves were imported to counteract the rapid decline in the Native American populations. When the indigenous inhabitants recovered sufficiently to provide the required labour, the demand for expensive African slaves diminished. Between 1519 and 1650 Mexico imported about 120,000 African slaves, or slightly fewer than 1,000 per year. From 1650 to 1810, however, Mexico received 80,000 Africans, a reduced rate of 500 slaves per year. Indeed, Mexican slave owners bought no more than 50,000 slaves during the entire 18th century, when the transatlantic slave trade was at its highest. Chile imported about 6,000, about one-third of whom arrived before 1615; most were used as agricultural labourers around Santiago. Argentina (mainly Buenos Aires) and Bolivia (mainly the mining areas around Charcas) brought in about 100,000 Africans. Import figures to all these areas were low compared with those for Brazil and the Caribbean.

Throughout Latin America and the Caribbean the slave population declined at the astonishing rate of 2 to 4 per cent a year. Thus, by the time slavery was abolished, the overall slave population in many places was far less than the total number of slaves imported. The British colony of Jamaica, for example, imported more than 600,000 slaves during the 18th century, yet, in 1838, the slave population numbered little more than 300,000. The French colony of St-Domingue (present Haiti) imported more than 800,000 Africans during the 18th century, but had only 480,000 slaves in 1790, on the eve of the revolution there. Between 1810 and 1870, the Spanish colony of Cuba acquired about 600,000 slaves. In 1880, however, the Cubans had only 200,000 slaves and an Afro-Cuban population of 450,000. Altogether, the 4.7 million Africans imported to the Caribbean over the centuries had diminished to about 2 million in 1880 as their descendants blended into the society.

A.5.

Blacks in Colonial Society

Latin American society was, in general, a three-tiered structure of castes, subdivided into classes. At the top were the Europeans; in the middle were the free non-whites; and at the bottom were the slaves and Native Americans. Each caste had its own set of legal rights and social privileges, which varied from place to place. In the sugar-producing areas and other plantation-based economic units of Brazil, the Caribbean, and the lowlands of Mexico, Colombia, and Peru, the rights of slaves as well as free people of colour tended to be legally circumscribed. The greater the demand for labour, the more severe the coercion and discrimination exercised against the African sector of the population. In the coffee, cattle, and fishing areas of southern Brazil, Puerto Rico, eastern Cuba, the interior of Argentina, and Venezuela, social mobility tended to be greater and internal class and caste distinctions more relaxed and less formal. In the towns and cities Africans filled occupational roles just as other free members of society did, although they tended to be employed for the more menial and unskilled tasks.

The majority of the black population in Latin America and the Caribbean spent their lives in domestic service or as agricultural labourers. About 20 per cent—both slave and free—were sailors, artisans, nursemaids, wet nurses, merchants, small shopkeepers, mining or sugar experts, or itinerant street vendors. Slavery was never simply a form of labour organization or just an economic enterprise. It was a socio-economic relationship held together by law and custom.

B.

Emancipation

Throughout the history of slavery in the Americas, some masters voluntarily freed, or manumitted, their slaves. In the Spanish colonies, slaves could purchase their freedom on a time-purchase plan called coartación (restriction). A similar scheme prevailed in Brazil and the sugar colonies of the Caribbean. Almost everywhere, female urban slaves constituted the majority of those who benefited from voluntary manumissions and self-purchase. The children of these women were also freed. In addition, some free white fathers emancipated their children born of slave mothers, and the state also occasionally granted slaves their freedom.

B.1.

The Free Blacks

The importance of slavery in the economy of the New World between 1600 and 1850 has frequently overshadowed the fact that many Africans came to the Americas as free, or semifree, people. The first group of free, or semifree, Africans arrived in the early 16th century with the earliest European colonists. The second group came during the 19th century, mainly as part of a British-sponsored attempt to provide an alternative source to African slave labour. In addition to these free immigrants—of whom about 50,000 settled in the British and French West Indies—each slave society contained, almost from its beginning, an increasing number of manumitted blacks.

By 1800 this free population had become a fixture of every slave society in the Americas. In the New Granada provinces (present Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador), the free black population in 1789 was 420,000, whereas African slaves numbered only 20,000. Free blacks also outnumbered slaves in Peru, Argentina, and Brazil. In Puerto Rico they numbered nearly half the total population in 1812. In Cuba, by contrast, free blacks made up only 15 per cent of the population in 1827; in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) the ratio was even lower at 5 per cent in 1789, and in Jamaica it was a mere 3 per cent in 1800. Thus, in plantation societies, opportunities for emancipation did not come easily, whereas in regions where there was a more mixed economy, the free black and mulatto (of mixed black and white parentage) population expanded considerably.

B.2.

The Campaign Against the Slave Trade

By the end of the 18th century, the possibility of a general emancipation of all slaves became the concern of every slave society. By the 16th century Spanish missionaries such as Antonio Montesino and Bartolomé de Las Casas were critical of slavery, and in the 17th century English Quakers opposed both slavery and the slave trade. General disapproval developed only during the 18th century, however, when the rational attitudes of the Enlightenment combined with British Evangelical Protestantism to form the intellectual preconditions for the abolitionist movement.

The British abolitionists, aware that their compatriots transported the greatest number of African slaves to the New World, concentrated their efforts against the slave trade rather than slavery itself, feeling that the termination of the trade would eventually lead to the end of the institution. The abolitionist attack was spearheaded by Granville Sharp, a humanitarian who in 1772 persuaded the British courts to declare that slavery could not exist in England. The ruling immediately affected the slaves (more than 15,000) brought into the country by their colonial masters, who valued them at approximately £700,000. In 1776, the British philosopher and economist Adam Smith declared in his classic economic study, The Wealth of Nations, that slavery was uneconomical because the plantation system was a wasteful use of land and because slaves cost more to maintain than free labourers.

By the 1780s, slavery was being attacked, directly and indirectly, from several sources. Evangelicals condemned it on the grounds of Christian charity and the assumption of a natural law of common humanity. Economists opposed slavery because it wasted valuable resources. Political philosophers saw it as the basis of unjust privilege and unequal distribution of social, corporate responsibility. In 1787, Thomas Clarkson, an English cleric, joined Granville Sharp and Josiah Wedgwood, the renowned English potter, to form a society for the abolition of the slave trade. The society recruited William Wilberforce as its parliamentary spokesman and in 1788 succeeded in getting Prime Minister William Pitt to set up a select committee of the Privy Council to investigate the slave trade. The year before, the society had established Sierra Leone in West Africa as a refuge for the “London black poor”, and it achieved other successes.

B.3.

Abolition of the Slave Traffic

A bill designed to restrict the number of slaves carried by each ship, based on the ship's tonnage, was enacted by the British Parliament on June 17, 1788. That same year French abolitionists, inspired by their English counterparts, founded the Société des Amis des Noirs (Society of the Friends of Blacks). Denmark was the first European country to abolish the slave trade in 1792. Not until 1807 did the British Parliament pass an act prohibiting British subjects from engaging in the slave trade after March 1, 1808. In 1811, slave trading was declared a felony punishable by transportation (exile to a penal colony) for all British subjects or foreigners caught trading in British possessions. Britain then assumed most of the responsibility for abolishing the transatlantic slave trade, partly to protect its sugar colonies. In 1815 Portugal accepted £750,000 to restrict the trade to Brazil; and in 1817 Spain accepted £400,000 to abandon the trade to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo. In 1818 Holland and France abolished the trade. After 1824, slave trading was declared tantamount to piracy, and until 1837 participants faced the death penalty.

B.4.

Abolition of Slavery

The campaigns to abolish the trade exposed the abusive nature of slavery and led to the formation of the British Anti-Slavery Society in 1823. Long before that, the thrust for full emancipation of the enslaved Africans had begun with the successful revolt of the slaves in the French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1791, during the French Revolution (1789-1799). In 1793 the radical French commissioner, Léger Félicité Sonthonax, freed all slaves and admitted them to full citizenship, a move ratified the following year by the revolutionary government in Paris, which extended emancipation to all French colonies. This measure was revoked by Napoleon I in 1802. Emancipation nevertheless remained permanent in Haiti, which won its independence in 1804 under the black leader Jean Jacques Dessalines. Elsewhere slaves contributed to the disintegration of the system, but the official acts of emancipation lay outside their hands. Only in Haiti did they seize and hold political power.

During the struggle of the South American colonies for independence from Spain (1810-1825) both the insurgents and the loyalists promised to emancipate all slaves who took part in military campaigns. Mexico, the Central American states, and Chile abolished slavery once they were independent. In 1821 the Venezuelan Congress approved a law reaffirming the abolition of the slave trade, liberating all slaves who had fought with the victorious armies, and establishing a system that immediately manumitted all children of slaves, while gradually freeing their parents. The last Venezuelan slaves were freed in 1854. In Argentina the process began in 1813 and ended with the ratification of the 1853 constitution by the city of Buenos Aires in 1861.

Brazil suffered a long internal struggle over abolition and was the last Latin American country to adopt it. In 1864 the Brazilian emperor Pedro II emancipated the slaves that formed part of his daughter's dowry and acceded to the request of French abolitionists that the government commit itself to ending slavery. When the costly Paraguayan war between Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay ended in 1870, more than 20,000 slaves were freed as a reward for their services. In 1871 the Brazilian Congress approved the Rio Branco Law of Free Birth, which conditionally freed the children of slaves. Until they were eight years old, such children remained in the custody of the mother's master. At that time the state could compensate the master for the emancipation of the child, or the master could elect to have the child work without wages for 13 years. This scheme failed to satisfy advocates of outright abolition, who won widespread support in the late 1870s. In 1884 dissatisfaction increased when it became known that in 12 years the Rio Branco Law had freed only about 20,000 slaves, which was less than 20 per cent of those voluntarily manumitted. In 1887 army officers refused to order their troops to recapture runaway slaves, and in 1888 the Senate passed a law establishing immediate, unqualified emancipation.

Caribbean colonies required action by their European mother countries. In the British, French, Danish, and Dutch Antilles, economic problems in the early 19th century combined with humanitarian and political pressures from Europe to weaken the planters' resistance to emancipation. West Indian sugar exports stabilized in volume and declined in price, reducing profit margins. Meanwhile, the slaves became increasingly difficult to control. Emancipation became part of a general reform movement in Britain in the 1830s, and the British Parliament abolished slavery in 1834, instituting an apprenticeship programme for former slaves, an arrangement that lasted until 1838. France and Denmark followed Britain's example in 1848, and the Netherlands did so in 1863. In every case, emancipation resulted from the combined pressure of political reformers, humanitarian idealists, and believers in more efficient methods of production. These groups formed a coalition that overwhelmed opposition from the colonial slave owners. Slaves also contributed to the disintegration of the system by actively rebelling and by passively increasing production and administrative costs.

In 1812, largely under pressure from Cuban slave owners, Spain refused Puerto Rico's request for the abolition of slavery on that island. In 1870 the Spanish Moret law freed the newborn offspring of slaves, all those more than 60 years old, and those who fought for Spain in the Ten Years' War in Cuba. Slavery in Puerto Rico was abolished in 1873, and in 1880 a system of gradual, indemnified emancipation was established in Cuba. The gradual system of emancipation was abandoned in 1886, when the last 30,000 Cuban slaves were granted immediate freedom.

C.

Black Society after Emancipation

The black inhabitants of Latin America and the Caribbean were able to enjoy the rights of full freedom depending on their relative numbers, their economic or occupational roles, and the degree of their access to political power. In parts of Latin America where there was a small black population, cultural and genetic integration with the white or Native American majority gradually blurred the obvious ethnic distinctions.

In Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay, the black sector constituted less than 1 per cent of the population. In Central America, coastal Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, and the Caribbean, the black concentration ranged from 2 per cent (Honduras) to 99 per cent (Haiti). People of mixed African, European, and Native American ancestry, however, had ceased to be counted as “black”.

C.1.

Prejudice Against Blacks

The rise of pseudo-scientific racism and the popularity of social-engineering ideas among Latin American white elites militated against the social acceptance of the black population. The positivist followers of the 19th-century French philosopher Auguste Comte thought Africans were far from ready to take their place in the modern technical world, and neglected them. Adherents of Social Darwinism considered the African dimension of the pluralistic society a sign of fundamental weakness because they assumed the natural superiority of the white race. The preoccupation of the followers of Karl Marx with class conditions dulled their awareness of the problems of race and colour. Thus, the Latin American elites of the 19th century refused to accept cultural pluralism because they feared sharing power with the domestic black populations. Several Latin American nations adopted laws prohibiting black immigration during the 19th century. In most areas, the economic situation had not yet diversified or expanded sufficiently by the 1990s to allow blacks to move out of menial occupations. Most of them, therefore, remain in the lowest economic and social strata.

C.2.

Assimilation of the Latin Population

The prevalence of intermarriage has precluded the historical development of a two-tiered society, and a racially mixed “coloured” (as distinct from black) group has frequently shared the legal and economic opportunities of the white elites. Race mixture in Latin America, however, is too complex for easy categorization. Centuries of contact among African, European, Native American, and Asian people have produced such a complex mixture of social and ethnic groups that determining status and racial origins depends on many factors.

When slavery collapsed, governments compensated not the former slaves, but the former slave owners. The black masses possessed neither the requisite economic base nor the skills to compete with the wave of new immigrants who poured into south-eastern South America. Between 1870 and 1963, Brazil absorbed nearly 5 million European immigrants, a large number of whom had official or private sponsors who paid for their transport and resettlement costs. Eighty per cent of these immigrants settled in São Paulo and the southern states of the country, virtually inundating the resident black populations. Later economic expansion did not substantially improve the poor economic conditions of the blacks. Colour and race contributed to the continued expulsion of Afro-Brazilians from occupations above the marginal and menial tasks assigned to servants, casual labourers, porters, and other unorganized groups.

In Argentina the impact of European immigration on the country's black people was even more dramatic. Between 1869 and 1914, the Argentine population increased from 1.8 million to 7.9 million. During this period the total population in the city of Buenos Aires increased eightfold, but its black population remained stable. In 1970 the Afro-Argentines numbered only about 4,000 in a city population of 8 million. Most black men died in continuous wars, and a large number of Afro-Argentine women married European immigrants, thereby losing their ethnic identity.

C.3.

Peasant and Maroon Communities

In the Caribbean region the situation was different. White immigrants to the islands were not numerous enough to swamp the Afro-Caribbean populations. Consequently, they forced blacks to handle the agricultural work in order to support the community. In some countries, independent African-American communities were established in remote areas by runaway slaves known as Maroons. Maroon settlements were continually challenged by planters needing slaves. The Maroons resisted in Palmares, Brazil (c. 1605-1695), and in Esmerablas, Ecuador (1570-1738). In Jamaica they signed a formal treaty in 1796 with the British government after a series of conflicts and retained their independence until 1962. The Maroons were the first black peasants in the Caribbean region.

The trend towards subsistence farming expanded greatly during the period after the abolition of slavery. Former slaves bought up abandoned or bankrupt estates throughout the Caribbean. In Barbados and Antigua this was difficult, but in Cuba and Puerto Rico, land was available outside the sugar zones. Villages made up of free peasants thus became a feature of Caribbean life. Blacks also entered commerce, the professions, and government. Throughout the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, Haiti remained the only independent black nation in the Americas. By 1962, however, when Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and other nations had become independent, there still remained much to improve in the economic realm.

D.

Culture

A strong African influence pervades music, dance, the arts, literature, language, and religious practices in Latin America and the Caribbean. Africans, whether as slaves or free immigrants, brought a variety of African cultural influences to the New World. They came from too many places in Africa and were too scattered throughout the Americas to re-establish all the conditions of their homelands, but wherever possible, they did their best to reconcile reality with their beliefs. Like all other immigrant groups, they abandoned some aspects of their culture, modified others, and created new forms. This adaptation to local American conditions is called creolization. The number of Africans in proportion to the local society, and the length of time they spent in any one place were crucial in the development of an African-American culture.

D.1.

Regional Differences

In countries such as Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, African immigrants were a minority having to deal with a vital and dynamic form of European society and culture. The African communities survived, and in some instances proliferated, but they did so against the stiff and relentless competition of the predominant, or “high”, culture. Aspects of the African ethnic subculture were eventually adopted by the mainstream. Nonetheless, in such societies, the African character of the African-American culture is less pronounced than in societies where Africans formed the majority of the inhabitants.

In the plantation societies of the Caribbean islands, people of African ancestry retained considerable control over their daily lives, despite the efforts of the politically dominant minority group to restrain and coerce them. The lack of cultural homogeneity as well as the paucity of the plantation elites provided an almost unique opportunity for the African masses to fashion their own society and influence “high” culture.

Caribbean people speak variants of the standard European languages, which uniformly reflect West African speech patterns regardless of whether the spoken language is English, Spanish, French, or Dutch. The French spoken in Haiti constitutes a language of its own. In Curaçao, Aruba, and Bonaire, Papiamento, a blend of Dutch, Spanish, and English, is one of the official languages. These creole languages are no longer confined to the poorer, unschooled classes but have been accorded greater respect in the literature and political life of the islands.

D.2.

Cultural Modifications

Official acceptance modifies some forms of culture. The carnival is an example. Until the 19th century, the annual celebration of carnival was confined to the black population, while the upper classes deplored carnival and tried to destroy it as a public festival. By the early 20th century, however, it had attracted all classes and races, and currently it has official government support in the Bahamas, Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, and Brazil. Although carnival has become respectable, and its festivities are open to all races and classes, the chief participants of these carnivals are still black. The same remains true for other folk festivals such as the Jonkonnu in Jamaica.

In some cases, however, the transition from low to high culture obscured African influences, as in Argentina where the tango was developed from dual African ancestry. One source is undoubtedly the Spanish fandango (a dance for two people), but the fandango is really Moorish. The other source is a black dance called the candombe, the main attraction of Afro-Argentine festivals from the periods before and after the abolition of slavery. Latin American music has always been deeply influenced by the vibrant rhythms and melodies that blacks brought with them from their African regions of origin. This is particularly true of Brazil where the first music school was founded by a black priest. Brazilian music is thoroughly imbued with African themes, and illustrious composers such as Heitor Villa-Lobos have long found inspiration in black musical heritage. Many Caribbean musical styles have become widely known, including the mambo from Cuba, salsa from Puerto Rico, reggae from Jamaica, and calypso from Trinidad.

D.3.

Religious Practices

African immigrants to Latin America and the Caribbean not only retained some of their original religious beliefs but also borrowed and modified religious rituals from the various European Christian Churches they encountered there. Religious affiliation, however, is no longer restricted by race or colour. A number of Christian groups such as the Seventh-day Adventists, Pentecostals, and Churches of God are predominantly black. On the other hand, religious sects of African origin, such as the voodoo in Haiti; Shango in Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela, and Brazil; Santería in Cuba and Puerto Rico; Kumina, Myal, Revivalist, and Rastafari in Jamaica; and Umbanda, Macounda, and others in Brazil, no longer only attract black devotees.

D.4.

Black Literature

African-Americans have left a deep impression on the lore and literature of the New World. In some parts of Latin America, such as Brazil, many popular tales and legends are of African origin. Themes dealing with slavery have always been popular with black writers. Some, such as the Brazilian poet Luis Gama, were also active in the abolitionist movement. Antônio de Castro Alves was identified as the “poet of the slaves” for his treatment of slavery in his writings. João da Cruz e Sousa, the son of emancipated slaves, is considered one of Brazil's greatest poets.

With the growth of nationalism in the 20th century, more attention has been paid to the African origins of writers. The Haitian poet Jacques Roumain stressed the value of his indigenous (African) culture, while expressing the pride and bitterness of his black ancestry. Nicolás Guillén, one of Cuba's most eminent poets, wrote some of his best works as “black” poetry based on the rhythms of Afro-Cuban music. The novels, poetry, dance, and mime of Latin America and the Caribbean area have all incorporated African speech patterns, styles, or concepts and have tried to express the spirit of the black cultural heritage. The poetry of Derek Walcott, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1992, and the autobiographical short stories of Jamaica Kincaid attempt to reconcile the differences between their native West Indian and adoptive white milieus.

E.

Politics

The Maroon settlements in the days of slavery were attempts to form black states; they were, in effect, states within states. When the slaves of Haiti, led by Jean Jacques Dessalines, took over the government of the region in 1804, it became the second independent country in the western hemisphere (the first being the United States) and the first one ruled by blacks. As such, it became a symbol of black independence and a catalyst for black nationalism. Blacks in many other countries participated in politics within the prevailing political structures, but in some nations such activities were restricted. In Cuba, for example, a law forbade the organization of political parties based on race or colour after 1911, and the military efforts of the Afro-Cuban leaders Pedro Ivonet and Evaristo Estenoz to reverse that decision ended in disaster in 1912. Government troops killed 3,000 Afro-Cubans in Oriente Province, putting an end to black political resistance in Cuba. In Brazil, the Frente Negra Brazileira (Brazilian Black Front), founded in São Paulo in 1931, served as the national political voice of Afro-Brazilians, but faded along with other political parties during the dictatorship of Getúlio Dornelles Vargas in the 1930s and 1940s. In the British, French, and Dutch Caribbean, blacks have participated in politics since the second half of the 19th century, and today hold local political power. Governments controlled by people of African ancestry are in power in the Netherlands Antilles, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, St Lucia, Grenada, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Dominica, Antigua, St Kitts and Nevis, and Jamaica. The Marxist government of Cuba under Fidel Castro has declared Cubans an Afro-Latin American people and in the 1960s and 1970s formed close ties with Angola, Ethiopia, and other African states.

Other Caribbean countries have also established contacts with the free nations of Africa, both directly and through United Nations agencies and other international organizations. Caribbean-African cooperation, however, has more frequently been based on shared ideology rather than on race or colour.