ABSTRACT
THE story of the last years of the Atlantic Slave Trade abounds in paradoxes. About the time the Brazilian trade was abolished in 1850, the Cuban trade had all the appearance of being on the point of extinction: ten years later it was flourishing to an unprecedented extent. The resentment of the merchants and planters of the island was directed against the British, who, they argued, were attempting to ruin the country in the interests of their West Indian possessions. Events showed, however, that it was from the United States that the real threats to Cuban independence came. Perhaps the most extraordinary feature of the situation was the fact that, in its last stages, the Havana trade cannot be called a Cuban trade at all: it was financed by American capital, carried in American ships, manned by American seamen and protected by the American flag. Yet the government of the United States had declared the trade to be illegal half a century before.
