Cuban officials began to target European migrants, and recruited emigrants in Baltimore, New Orleans and Philadelphia. Driven by fear of a black majority, the planter class in Cuba, some of whom were of Irish extraction, persuaded the Spanish Crown in 1818 to promote white immigration by allowing Catholics who were not Spanish subjects to enter its colonies. They particularly feared alliances between free blacks and rebellious slaves, and set about promoting colonisation strategies to deliberately whiten (and Europeanise) the Spanish colony. Colonial authorities, anxious to control the majority black population, sought to curtail the dominance of free blacks in the skilled trades by replacing them with white workers. At the same time, a boom in sugar production saw the number of imported African slaves double between 18, as well as an increase in the number of free blacks. In the early decades of the nineteenth-century revolution, independence struggles and pressure to abolish slavery in the Atlantic world resulted in the escalation of slavery and a strengthening of Cuba's colonial relationship with Spain. This chapter examines the presence of Irish migrants in the context of colonial strategies to whiten the labour force through European immigration. Racial demographics, ethnicity and the supply of labour in nineteenth-century Cuba were crucial to colonial wealth and the political economy of the Spanish empire.
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