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French immigration to Cuba began in Cuba in the eighteenth century and increased significantly in the nineteenth century. The majority of French people settled in eastern Cuba. [1]
| Part of a series of articles on the |
| French people |
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French immigration to Cuba began in Cuba in the eighteenth century and increased significantly in the nineteenth century. The majority of French people settled in eastern Cuba. [1]
The first wave of French immigrants to arrive in Cuba were fleeing the Haitian Revolution and the new governmental administration of Haiti after independence was declared. This immigration reached its peak between 1800 and 1809, when more than twenty-seven thousand French of all social classes arrived in the eastern part of Cuba. Many of them emigrated to the city of Santiago de Cuba, which had neither sidewalks nor paved streets, and lacked drinking water, supplies and dwellings for the refugees.
The newcomers soon recognized the favorable conditions the new land presented. Initially, they worked in the port, and traded with the Catalans who had settled in Santiago. Consequently, the port of Santiago de Cuba saw much more commercial activity. With the resultant increase of the white population of the city, for the first time it had a relative balance between the black and the white populations. An apothecary and shops selling imported comestibles were opened, new government buildings were built, and postal service was expanded.
The Captaincy General of Cuba of the island approved the growing of coffee and many French-Haitian migrants were used for work in the coffee fields, especially those white French who were considered "solvent and reliable". By 1804 there were three thousand men cultivating the land, and agricultural lands were bought, sold and resold while Creole and French investors provided capital for new business ventures that became the economic engine of Santiago.
In 1807, coffee shipped to the United States and Spain was the principal Cuban export. Sebastián Kindelán y O’Regan, governor of Santiago, reported five hundred thousand coffee plants being cultivated on the island; the crop's yield of ten million pounds that year would be quadrupled in 1810. The beginning of the Peninsular War (1807–1814) between France and Spain caused the Captaincy General of the island to expel Franco-Haitian and French residents, and only those French who were naturalized Spanish citizens and had assimilated into the Spanish culture were allowed to remain. The exact number of French persons expelled from Santiago de Cuba is unknown, most of them moved to the southern United States, especially Louisiana.
In 1814, when peace between France and Spain was restored, the French immigrants who had left Cuba were allowed to return to the island. They, together with new French immigrants, formed a second wave of French immigration to Santiago de Cuba.
This second wave promoted an increase in economic activity in the city, and resulted in Santiago becoming a prime exporter of coffee. Sugarcane-raising expanded in the surrounding savannas, while new roads and aqueducts were built to encourage the settling of the Sierra Maestra.
Between 1818 and 1835 a third wave of immigration to Santiago de Cuba occurred, prompted by a royal order from the Spanish Crown intended to increase the proportion of whites in the Cuban population. While only a quarter of the population were engaged in agriculture, commercial activities were much more robust than before.
Since 1821, only a few years after a treaty was signed in 1817 between Spain and England to abolish the slave trade, this trade had nevertheless increased, and increased exports of sugar, honey, wax, coffee, tobacco and rum made the port of Santiago one of Cuba's busiest. With French investment in exploiting the mines in the area, mining had become a new and important sector in the city's economic development. With the general increase in mercantile activity, many new shops of all sorts were opened and tradesmen found a larger market for their products or labor.
The fourth and final wave of French immigrants to Santiago de Cuba occurred between 1836 and 1868. In this period over 2200 French settlers emigrated, most of them coming from the Atlantic coast of France. The local economy was strengthened while the immigrants were absorbed into traditional occupations. In 1851, a French-owned steamship line was inaugurated to improve communications between Santiago de Cuba and New York City.
The civil engineer Jules Sagebien, a French immigrant from Picardy, after making a trip to Europe to learn engineering techniques for the building of railroads, did some technically challenging work for the Santiago de Cuba Railroad, which traverses rugged mountainous terrain. [2] In July 1844, he surveyed the Santiago-Cobre line built to transport ore from the island's only copper mine to the port of Santiago, [3] a railway project for the Eastern Department, the first of its kind in the region, according to historian Laura Cruz Ríos. [4]
Coffee remained the number one crop in the Santiago de Cuba region, exceeding the sugar cane crop in value, until it reached its highest production in the 1840s. Towards the end of this decade, however, coffee production began to decline with the bankruptcy of some of the large landowners; investors then began to direct their capital into copper mining and sugar production. The French still had a presence in diverse sectors of the Cuban economy throughout the 19th century, especially in commercial trade, but also in agriculture, marine shipping, and the professions, including medicine, engineering, law, and pedagogy.
The number of Cubans of French ancestry remains unknown. In some historical works, the number of French emigrants to Cuba is reported to be over 60,000 during the Haitian Revolution. In those days the total population of Cuba was less than 1,000,0000 and the proportion of whites to blacks was about 50% whites and 50% blacks. This meant that 10–12% of whites were French refugees. On 1 May 2012, the number of registered residents in the French Consulate record was 534, two thirds of them residing in Havana. They were primarily officials of the French Embassy, the Alliance Française and their families, and French expatriates working for French companies operating in Cuba and their families. [5]
There hasn't been a specific study to resolve this question, but around 1-1.5 million Cubans have at least one French ancestor. This is considering the history of Cuba and the waves of colonial and republican-era migration. The most significant settlement regions are the provinces of Cienfuegos and Holguín.
The recorded history of the Dominican Republic began in 1492 when Christopher Columbus, working for the Crown of Castile, arrived at a large island in the western Atlantic Ocean, later known as the Caribbean. The native Taíno people, an Arawakan people, had inhabited the island during the pre-Columbian era, dividing it into five chiefdoms. They referred to the eastern part of the island as Quisqueya, meaning 'mother of all lands.' Columbus claimed the island for Castile, naming it La Isla Española, which was later Latinized to Hispaniola.
Saint-Domingue was a French colony in the western portion of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, in the area of modern-day Haiti, from 1697 to 1804. The name derives from the Spanish main city on the island, Santo Domingo, which came to refer specifically to the Spanish-held Captaincy General of Santo Domingo, now the Dominican Republic. The borders between the two were fluid and changed over time until they were finally solidified in the Dominican War of Independence in 1844.
Santiago de Cuba is the second-largest city in Cuba and the capital city of Santiago de Cuba Province. It lies in the southeastern area of the island, some 870 km (540 mi) southeast of the Cuban capital of Havana.
Sugar plantations in the Caribbean were a major part of the economy of the islands in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Most Caribbean islands were covered with sugar cane fields and mills for refining the crop. The main source of labor, until the abolition of chattel slavery, was enslaved Africans. After the abolition of slavery, indentured laborers from India, China, Portugal and other places were brought to the Caribbean to work in the sugar industry. These plantations produced 80 to 90 percent of the sugar consumed in Western Europe, later supplanted by European-grown sugar beet.
The history of the Jews in Latin America began with conversos who joined the Spanish and Portuguese expeditions to the continents. The Alhambra Decree of 1492 led to the mass conversion of Spain's Jews to Catholicism and the expulsion of those who refused to do so. However, the vast majority of conversos never made it to the New World and remained in Spain slowly assimilating to the dominant Catholic culture. This was due to the requirement by Spain's Blood Statutes to provide written documentation of Old Christian lineage to travel to the New World. However, the first Jews came with the first expedition of Christopher Columbus, including Rodrigo de Triana and Luis De Torres.
Corsican immigration to Puerto Rico resulted in the 19th century from widespread economic and political changes in Europe that made life difficult for the peasant and agricultural classes in Corsica and other territories. The Second Industrial Revolution drew more people into urban areas for work, widespread crop failure resulted from long periods of drought, and crop diseases, and political discontent rose. In the early nineteenth century, Spain lost most of its possessions in the so-called "New World" as its colonies won independence. It feared rebellion in its last two Caribbean colonies: Puerto Rico and Cuba. The Spanish Crown had issued the Royal Decree of Graces of 1815 which fostered and encouraged the immigration of European Catholics, even if not of Spanish origin, to its Caribbean colonies.
Isleños are the descendants of Canarian settlers and immigrants to present-day Louisiana, Puerto Rico, Texas, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and other parts of the Americas. In these places, the name isleño was applied to the Canary Islanders to distinguish them from Spanish mainlanders known as "peninsulars". Formerly used for the general category of people, it now refers to the specific cultural identity of Canary Islanders or their descendants throughout Latin America and in Louisiana, where they are still called isleños. Another name for Canary Islander in English is "Canarian." In Spanish, an alternative is canario or isleño canario.
San Fernando de Monte Cristi, also known as Montecristi, is the capital town of Monte Cristi Province in the Dominican Republic. It is located in the northwest region of the country in a coastal area above the border with Haiti.
French immigration to Puerto Rico came about as a result of the economic and political situations which occurred in various places such as Louisiana, Saint-Domingue (Haiti) and in Europe.
The Captaincy General of Cuba was an administrative district of the Spanish Empire created in 1607 as part of Habsburg Spain attempt to better defend and administer its Caribbean possessions. The reform also established captaincies general in Puerto Rico, Guatemala and Yucatán.
Havana was founded in the sixteenth century displacing Santiago de Cuba as the island's most important city when it became a major port for Atlantic shipping, particularly the Spanish treasure fleet.
Spanish immigration to Cuba began in 1492, when the Spanish first landed on the island, and continues to the present day. The first sighting of a Spanish boat approaching the island was on 27 October 1492, probably at Bariay on the eastern point of the island. Columbus, on his first voyage to the Americas, sailed south from what is now The Bahamas to explore the northeast coast of Cuba and the northern coast of Hispaniola. Columbus came to the island believing it to be a peninsula of the Asian mainland.
The Spanish diaspora consists of Spanish people and their descendants who emigrated from Spain.
Slavery in Haiti began at an unknown time with slavery being practiced by the native populations when Europeans first arrived on the island in 1492. Europeans engaged in forced labor of the native population until that community was decimated by disease. To replace the diminished native labor, enslaved Africans began being imported in earnest during the 16th century. By the early 17th century the Saint-Domingue was a slave society with the majority of the population enslaved.
White Dominicans, also known as Caucasian Dominicans, are Dominicans of total or predominantly European or West Asian ancestry. The 2022 Dominican Republic census reported that 1,611,752 people or 18.7% of those 12 years old and above identify as white, 731,855 males and 879,897 females. An estimate put it at 17.8% of the Dominican Republic's population, according to a 2021 survey by the United Nations Population Fund.
White Haitians, are Haitians of predominant or full European descent. There were approximately 20,000 whites around the Haitian Revolution, mainly French, in Saint-Domingue. They were divided into two main groups: The Planters and Petit Blancs. The first Europeans to settle in Haiti were the Spanish. The Spanish enslaved the indigenous Haitians to work on sugar plantations and in gold mines. European diseases such as measles and smallpox killed all but a few thousand of the indigenous Haitians. Many other indigenous Haitians died from overwork and harsh treatment in the mines from slavery. Most Europeans who settled in Haiti were killed or fled during the Haitian Revolution.
In the 2020 United States census, the number of people who identified as "European alone" was 536,044 or 16.5%, with an additional non-Hispanic 24,548, for a total population of 560,592.
Slavery in Cuba was a portion of the larger Atlantic slave trade that primarily supported Spanish plantation owners engaged in the sugarcane trade. It was practiced on the island of Cuba from the 16th century until it was abolished by Spanish royal decree on October 7, 1886.
Cuban immigration to the United States, for the most part, occurred in two periods: the first series of immigration of wealthy Cuban Americans to the United States resulted from Cubans establishing cigar factories in Tampa and from attempts to overthrow Spanish colonial rule by the movement led by José Martí, the second to escape from Communist rule under Fidel Castro following the Cuban Revolution. Massive Cuban migration to Miami during the second series led to major demographic and cultural changes in Miami. There was also economic emigration, particularly during the Great Depression in the 1930s. As of 2019, there were 1,359,990 Cubans in the United States.
Mixed Dominicans or Moreno Dominicans, also referred to as mulatto, mestizo or historically zambo, are Dominicans who are of mixed ancestry, these stand out for having brown skin. Representing 71.72% of the Dominican Republic's population, they are by far the single largest racial grouping of the country.
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