w in the
island of Cuba, will perish, victims to the cruelty of the Europeans." Yet
Gomara stated that there was not an Indian in Cuba after 1553. Whatever the
exact truth regarding numbers, it is evident that they disappeared rapidly,
worked to death by severe task-masters. The institution of African slavery,
to take the place of the inefficient and fast disappearing native labor,
had its beginning in 1521. Baron Humboldt states that from that time until
1790, the total number of African negroes imported as slaves was 90,875.
In the next thirty years, the business increased rapidly, and Humboldt
estimates the total arrivals, openly entered and smuggled in, from 1521 to
1820, as 372,449. Mr. J.S. Thrasher, in a translation of Humboldt's work,
issued in 1856, added a footnote showing the arrivals up to 1854 as
644,000. A British official authority, at the same period, gives the total
as a little less than 500,000. The exact number is not important. The
institution on a large scale, in its relation to the total number of
whites, was a fact.

It is, of course, quite impossible even today to argue the question of
slavery. To many, the offence lies in the mere fact; to others, it lies in
the operation of the system. At all events, the institution is no longer
tolerated in any civilized country. While some to whom the system itself
was a bitter offence have found much to criticize in its operation in Cuba,
the general opinion of observers appears to be that it was there notably
free from the brutality usually supposed to attend it. The Census Report of
1899, prepared under the auspices of the American authorities, states that
"while it was fraught with all the horrors of this nefarious business
elsewhere, the laws for the protection of slaves were unusually humane.
Almost from the beginning, slaves had a right to purchase their freedom or
change their masters, and long before slavery was abolished they could own
property and contract marriage. As a result, the proportion of free colored
to slaves has always been large." Humboldt, who studied the institution
while it was most extensive, states that "the position of the free negroes
in Cuba is much better than it is elsewhere, even among those nations which
have for ages flattered themselves as being most advanced in civilization."
The movement for the abolition of slavery had its beginning in 1815, with
the treaty of Vienna, to which Spain was a party. Various acts in the same