Colonization European Colonization

Father Bartolome de Las Casas

Father Bartolome de Las Casas is one of the most prominent advocates of the Cuban indigenous people. He actually owned slaves himself at one point, yet he set his own slaves free and renounced the practice. He also joined the Dominican order of Christianity and protested against the cruel and unusual punishment that the indigent people had suffered. He was especially against the practice of encomienda which is to trade a life for other material possessions. He wrote:

"The Indies were discovered in 1492. In the following year a great many Spaniards went there with the intention of settling the land. Thus, forty-nine years have passed since...

"And Spaniards have behaved in no other way during the past forty years, down to the present time, for they are still acting like ravening beasts, killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing, and destroying the native peoples, doing all this with the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty, never seen or heard of before, and…