Havana Shipyards

Cuba Est. 1500s

The shipyards of Havana harbor were not a single enterprise but a collection of yards that built and repaired vessels throughout the Spanish colonial period. Havana's position at the nexus of Caribbean trade routes made it a natural center for shipbuilding, and the island's tropical hardwoods provided materials that European builders couldn't match. Cuban mahogany, cedar, and other dense hardwoods produced hulls that resisted rot and marine borers far longer than European oak. Among the vessels built in Havana's yards was La Amistad, a schooner constructed for the coastal and Caribbean trade. In 1839, enslaved Africans aboard La Amistad revolted and seized the ship, leading to a legal case that reached the U.S. Supreme Court and became a landmark in the abolitionist movement. The ship herself was a standard product of the Cuban yards: a fast, weatherly schooner built for moving cargo, including human cargo, around the Caribbean. Havana's shipbuilding tradition declined with Spanish colonial power, and the yards that once served the empire's Caribbean fleet have long since disappeared under the modern city.

Heritage

The Havana shipyards represent the maritime infrastructure of colonialism. These yards built the vessels that connected Spain's Caribbean empire: merchant ships, naval vessels, and the smaller craft that moved goods and enslaved people between islands. The labor that built these ships was itself often enslaved or coerced. La Amistad's construction in a Havana yard is a bitter irony: a ship built in a colonial slave economy became the vessel whose revolt challenged that economy's legal foundations. The Supreme Court case that followed the uprising, argued by former President John Quincy Adams, affirmed that the captives were free people kidnapped in violation of international law. The ship that carried them to that verdict was just another product of Cuba's anonymous waterfront yards.

Vessels (1)

La Amistad

The Amistad was a small, unremarkable Spanish schooner that moved cargo between Cuban ports. In June 1839, she was carrying 53 Africans who had been kidnapped from Sierra Leone, shipped across the Atlantic on the slave ship Tecora, and sold at auction in Havana. They were being transported to a sugar plantation in Puerto Principe when Sengbe Pieh, known to the courts as Joseph Cinque, led a revolt. The captives broke free of their chains using a nail and a file. They killed the captain and the cook. They spared two crew members, Jose Ruiz and Pedro Montes, and ordered them to sail back to Africa. Ruiz and Montes complied during the day but reversed course at night, sailing northwest instead of east. For two months the Amistad zigzagged up the American coast while the Africans slowly starved. The US Navy brig Washington intercepted the Amistad off Long Island in August 1839. What followed was a legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court. The Spanish government demanded the return of their "property." President Van Buren wanted to comply. Abolitionists funded the defense. Former president John Quincy Adams, 73 years old and half-retired, argued the case before the Supreme Court in a performance that lasted eight hours over two days. The Court ruled that the Africans had been illegally kidnapped and had the right to use force to secure their freedom. They were not property. They were free people. Thirty-five survivors eventually returned to Sierra Leone in 1842, funded by abolitionist donations. The case didn't end slavery. It didn't even slow it down much. But it established in American law that enslaved people were human beings with legal rights, and it gave the abolitionist movement a victory they could point to for the next twenty years. The ship's name means "friendship" in Spanish. The irony writes itself.

c. 1833-1839 · exploration