From the streets of Ferguson to the South Carolina statehouse, the legacy of slavery in the United States has taken on a new urgency in contemporary America. Today, 150 years after the end of the Civil War, so many of slavery’s scars are still visible, particularly in the South. We must also remember America’s all-but-forgotten ties to slavery in a deeper south – Cuba.

Last December, President Obama announced a new era in U.S.-Cuba relations: “America chooses to cut loose the shackles of the past so as to reach for a better future,” he said, “for the Cuban people, for the American people, for our entire hemisphere, and for the world.” These words also hint at a darker history before the Cuban Revolution; before the construction of Cuban casinos, hotels and nightclubs; before even the Spanish-American War. More than 200 years ago, the horrors of Cuban slavery and the slave trade made America possible.

Of the 12.5 million enslaved Africans who were brought to the Americas from 1501 to 1867, approximately 4 percent arrived in North America. Another 7 percent were taken to Cuba to work in what is now recognized as an “agro-industrial graveyard” of sugar and coffee production. Historians use this term for good reason: the life expectancy of enslaved Africans from the time of their arrival in Cuba was often calculated in single digits. These catastrophic mortality rates meant that Cuban slavery depended on the slave trade. Although the U.S. and England banned the slave trade in 1808, fully 85 percent (759,669) of the slaves to be transported to Cuba were brought after the U.S. ban. By this time, Americans had decided that Cuban slavery made good economic sense and were actively intensifying their participation in the regime.

After the American Revolution, the young United States was deeply in debt and on the verge of a rapid expansion of the cotton frontier. But the U.S. merchants who ran the nation’s banks and insurance companies could only provide agricultural loans with a reliable source of specie (gold and silver), and sugar and coffee to back their notes and offset trade deficits with the financial centers of Europe. If coffee, sugar and specie unlocked the doors of European and Asian markets for U.S. investors, slave ships were their key. By the early 1800s, Cuban slavery was at the center of this exchange, and American statesmen, including every U.S. president from Thomas Jefferson to John Quincy Adams, worked doggedly to protect it. ...