1510-00-00: (First Enslaved Africans Deported to the Island, Replacing the Rapidly Dying Taíno Population as Forced Labor for Spanish Colonial Operations): I…

1510-00-00: (First Enslaved Africans Deported to the Island, Replacing the Rapidly Dying Taíno Population as Forced Labor for Spanish Colonial Operations): In 1510, the first enslaved Africans were deported to the island. The Taíno population was dying so fast under Spanish forced labor and disease that the colonizers needed replacement workers to maintain their extraction economy. This moment marks the beginning of African enslavement on the island, a system that would persist for nearly three centuries and whose human, cultural, and political consequences would eventually produce the Haitian Revolution and what the world would call the first Black republic in the Western Hemisphere.