Morro and of La Punta, the fortress at the foot of the Prado, was begun.  The old city wall, of which portions still remain, was of a later period.  Despite these precautions, the city was repeatedly attacked by pirates and privateers.  Some reference to these experiences will be made in a special chapter on the city.  The slow progress of the island is shown by the fact that an accepted official report gives the total population in 1775 as 171,620, of whom less than 100,000 were white.  The absence of precious metals is doubtless the main reason for the lack of Spanish interest in the development of the country.  For a long time after the occupation, the principal industry was cattle raising.  Agriculture, the production of sugar, tobacco, coffee, and other crops, on anything properly to be regarded as a commercial scale, was an experience of later years.  The reason for this will be found in the mistaken colonial policy of Spain, a policy the application of which, in a far milder manner, cost England its richest colony in the Western Hemisphere, and which, in the first quarter of the 19th Century, cost Spain all of its possessions in this half of the world, with the exception of Cuba and Porto Rico.

II

NEW CUBA

While there is no point in Cuba’s history that may be said to mark a definite division between the Old Cuba and the New Cuba, the beginning of the 19th Century may be taken for that purpose.  Cuba’s development dragged for two hundred and fifty years.  The population increased slowly and industry lagged.  For this, Spain’s colonial policy was responsible.  But it was the policy of the time, carried out more or less effectively by all nations having colonies.  England wrote it particularly into her Navigation Acts of 1651, 1660, and 1663, and supported it by later Acts.  While not rigorously enforced, and frequently evaded by the American colonists, the system at last proved so offensive that the colonists revolted in 1775.  Most of Spain’s colonies in the Western Hemisphere, for the same reason, declared and maintained their independence in the first quarter of the 19th Century.  At the bottom of Cuba’s several little uprisings, and at the bottom of its final revolt in 1895, lay the same cause of offence.  In those earlier years, it was held that colonies existed solely for the benefit of the mother-country.  In 1497, almost at the very beginning of Spain’s colonial enterprises in the New World, a royal decree was issued under which the exclusive privilege to carry on trade with the colonies was granted to the port of Seville.  This monopoly was transferred to the port of Cadiz in 1717, but it continued, in somewhat modified form in later years, until Spain had no colonies left.