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The collector and independent scholar Emilio Cueto provides a historical inventory of seventeen graphic art images depicting Cuba, printed during the late Spanish colonial period (1762–1898). These images—primarily authored by Dutch, English, French, and German, not Spanish or Cuban artists—became the most widely circulated visual representations of the island, particularly the capital of Havana. Despite their fanciful and often inaccurate character, these prints depicted the landscape, architecture, people, and customs of the island. They became part of a well-known visual repertoire that fixed Cuba as an exotic tropical location in the global imagination. As Cueto underlines, “It was through engravings and lithographs that Cuba first became known both inside the island and abroad. Colonial Cuba was defined by its prints.”

Colonial Cuba is a period that corresponds to the rise and expansion of sugar production, slavery, and export-oriented sugar plantations at the end of the eighteenth century. This chapter describes the attempts to build sugar mills and the obstacles placed by the Spanish colonial system on the growth of the sugar economy during the 1600s. By examining the early stages of sugar production in Cuba, it attempts to fill a significant gap in the historiography of sugar and slavery in the Americas.

Art historian and curator E. Carmen Ramos focuses on the pioneering but problematic work of the nineteenth-century Spanish painter and caricaturist, Víctor Patricio de Landaluze, who spent much of his adult life in colonial Cuba. Despite his opposition to Cuba’s independence from Spain, Landaluze was one of the leading practitioners of costumbrismo (genre painting, or the literary and artistic representation of local customs) on the island, portraying human “types” such as Creole landowners, slaves, former slaves, mulatas, and guajiros (peasants). By the end of the nineteenth century, Landaluze had documented many aspects of Afro-Cuban daily life—including religion, music, and dance—all while, according to Ramos’s analysis, perpetuating the racial stereotypes of African savagery that was common in other former slave societies such as Brazil, the United States, and Puerto Rico. A close look at one of Landaluze’s most famous paintings, Corte de caña (Cutting Sugar Cane, 1874), reveals the racial anxieties among the peninsular Spanish, as well as some members of the Creole elite, provoked by the slaves’ emancipation and the war of national liberation in Cuba.

Art historian Alison Fraunhar examines how graphic and fine arts helped trace the contours of national identity in colonial Cuba well before the island’s independence. Fraunhar dwells on maps and other visual representations of rural and urban landscapes, people, and historical events that were critical to imagine Cuba as a separate nation with its own culture. The author argues persuasively that late nineteenth-century images of the island’s geography, history, and culture continue to be significant visual markers for contemporary Cuban artists.