Siege of Havana

Spain joined the Seven Years' War late, in 1762, and Britain answered by sending a fleet against Havana, the fortified harbour where Spain assembled its treasure convoys. The expedition landed east of the city in June and dragged siege guns up to the heights facing El Morro, the castle guarding the harbour mouth. The Spanish blocked the channel by sinking ships in it, which kept the British fleet out but also trapped their own warships inside. After weeks of bombardment British engineers mined the castle walls, El Morro was stormed on 30 July, and the city surrendered on 13 August. Yellow fever and malaria killed far more British soldiers than Spanish guns did, and at the peace the next year Britain handed Havana back in exchange for Florida.

Cuban historians have long treated the eleven month British occupation as a turning point, though they disagree about what kind: an older reading credited it with opening Havana to trade and to a surge in the slave trade that launched the sugar boom, while more recent work argues those changes were already under way and owed more to Spanish reforms after the city was returned. The defence produced local heroes, among them the Morro's commander Luis Vicente de Velasco, mortally wounded in the final assault, and the militia leader Jose Antonio Gomez, remembered as Pepe Antonio. In Britain critics of the peace argued that Havana had been worth far more than Florida. The loss pushed Spain into a major rebuilding of the city's defences, including the vast fortress of La Cabana across the harbour.