3) Spanish and other European immigrants that were encouraged to settle in Cuba as per attempts to "bleach" the island. This was the first time anything like this was seriously proposed since Haiti earned its independence. This is important to note because the "spectre" of Haiti loomed ominously over Spanish and Cuban whites for a century and most of their policies towards Cuba's Blacks were reflective of it. The following year, the Cuban Ward Connerly of his day, Martin Morúa Delgado was elected Speaker in Cuba's Senate. The year after that, Morúa introduced legislation that became known as the Morúa Amendment and it outlaws the PIC because is was based on race and racism was supposedly eradicated in Cuba. Just before the vote was taken to enact this bill into law, Estonez and other PIC leaders were imprisoned and were kept in jail until after the law was passed.
Plans to celebrate Haiti's 2004 bicentennial were discussed recently by Minister Leslie Voltaire at the Center for Constitutional Rights in Manhattan NY. He said plans were underway to have a large exhibition commemorating the international slave trade and a symposium of African writers in the diaspora.
On January 1, 1804, Gen. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, proclaimed to the world that his country, henceforth to be called Haiti, was free and independent. Previously dominated by France since buccaneers settled there in 1697, the small Caribbean island, whose eastern portion was under Spanish rule, had become an important slave colony. The slaves were imported from Africa and lived a harsh reality in comparison to the minority white slaveholding population. In 1789, Santo Domingo, as France called the colony, consisted of 450,000 enslaved Blacks, 40,000 whites, and 28,000 free Blacks and mulattos. The death rate for the enslaved population was high: While more than 800,000 Africans had been enslaved in the colony in the 1700s, only 450,000 survived in 1789. In 1791 a slave rebellion under the leadership of Vodou priest Boukman sparked a revolution that lasted thirteen years, culminating in independence in 1804. Toussaint L'Overture was the primary leader among the enslaved population, playing France against the British and Spanish, as he maneuvered the struggle closer to independence. However, in hoping to maintain a friendly relationship with France, L'Overture was deceived and placed in the French gallows upon an invitation to France. His able subordinates Dessalines and Henri Christophe, however, continued the liberation effort achieving independence and eventually driving all whites off the island nation.
