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part and parcel of North American politics and the culture of its economy. As a matter of fact, Plymouth, Massachusetts, and Jamestown, Virginia, did not become a reality for early settlers from England until 100 years after Africans had been transported to the Americas by the Spaniards and the Portuguese. By 1510 the first sizeable group of Spanish-speaking Africans (ladinos) arrived in Hispaniola from Spain. By 1518 non-Spanish-speaking Africans were being shipped directly from the Continent. Cuba received its first large group of slaves in 1520. Notably, the first major slave revolt in the Americas broke out in 1522 on Hispaniola, on the sugar plantation of Diego Columbus, Christopher's son. In both Cuba and Hispaniola, slave revolts began almost as soon as the Africans could plan an escape route or devise a means of retaliation. In 1533 a revolt at the Jobabo mines in the Oriente area of Cuba was recorded as eventful, although only four slaves, allegedly, took part. In his article, “The Slave Trade in Mexico,”Aguirre Beltran, the Mexican researcher of African populations in his country affirms, “The first slaves to arrive in Mexico accompanied their masters in the enormous task of the Conquest. They came from the island of Cuba, to which they had been brought under royal licenses several decades after the discovery of America” (429).
The island of Cuba and the island called Hispaniola, which later became Haiti and the Dominican Republic, were not the only Latin areas that saw the wheels of their colonial economy turn with the forced labor of African captives. Each and every country in Latin America that survived as a colony of Spain (or of Portugal, in the case of Brazil) and that early in the nineteenth century acquired independence from their European colonizers promoted their economy with slavery. Yet, when Aguirre Beltran published “The Slave Trade in Mexico” in 1944, the editor of the journal in which it appeared (The Hispanic American Historical Review) felt that more concentrated studies needed to be made on the African's presence in the Americas, and especially on the so-called Spanish-American mainland: