Mining for copper at El Cobre is an industry that stretches back
to at least the sixteenth century. The rich copper mines of the
Sierra Maestra in the south east of Cuba were worked for almost
three centuries by slave labour and free people of colour by the
Spanish. The Cobre copper mines, abandoned by the Spanish, had
fallen into disuse by the time they attracted the attention of a
British gentleman who, in Cuba to recover a mortgage debt on a
neighbouring property in the early 1830s, assayed some waste
from one of the mines. This proved to be remarkably rich and
this and other mines in the vicinity were acquired and re-opened
by a British company named El Compañía Consolidada de Minas del
Cobre (Cobre Mining Company) in the early 1830s and the
contiguous sett by another British company named El Real de
Santiago (Royal Santiago Mining Company). Both companies looked
to Cornwall, the foremost mining region in Britain, to supply
its technological and labour needs, importing steam engines from
Cornwall to drain