Exile to Cuba

Spain withdraws

By the early 1760s Spain’s long effort to hold the inhospitable Florida frontier was failing; the crown could no longer afford to subsidize the fort, and the residents of Mose could barely meet their own needs. In 1763 the Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years’ War by ceding Florida to Britain. For the free people of Mose, the change of flag meant the loss of the freedom the Spanish had granted them — under British law they would have been re-enslaved.

The crossing

So they left. In 1763 the community, including Francisco Menéndez, his wife María de Escovar, and four of their dependents, crossed to Cuba with the Spanish. They settled in what they called San Agustín de la Nueva Florida — “New Florida” — near Matanzas, where they carried their skills as farmers and soldiers into a new life. The fort and the town they had built were left behind, and their location was soon forgotten.

A legacy that outlasted the fort

The people of Mose did not know it, but their example had already traveled. The Spanish extended the religious-sanctuary policy confirmed at Mose to other parts of the Caribbean, to the disadvantage of Dutch, French, and British slaveholders; slaves fled to Puerto Rico from Guadeloupe in 1752 and from the Danish islands in 1767. The policy endured until 1790, when the Spanish government, under pressure from the new United States and its secretary of state Thomas Jefferson, finally abrogated it. Before that escape hatch closed, several hundred more enslaved people — including the slaves of British Loyalists — followed the example of the people of Mose to freedom in Florida. The determined fugitives who fought so hard to win their own freedom had, without knowing it, furthered the cause of freedom for others they never met.

Sources: Jane Landers, The American Historical Review 95, no. 1 (1990); Florida Museum of Natural History education packet (1991).