This book has emphasized the sensitivity of the Cuban slave market to short-term changes in economic and political variables affecting Cuban slavery. The most important episodic economic factors were the sharp rises in world market sugar prices of two periods: the 1790s and the 1850s. In the first cycle, increased demand for slaves relative to supplies in Cuba's expanding agricultural sector drove slave prices temporarily higher. But as the slave trade to Cuba accelerated in response to rising slave prices, market demands for slaves were satisfied, and prices stabilized after 1800. Indeed, the long-term stability in the price structure of the Cuban slave market between 1800 and 1850 suggests that the slave trade was always capable of meeting the labor demands of Cuba's colonial economy and that labor shortages were rarely problematic. Even during the rapid growth of sugar production during the 1830s, slave prices actually declined, indicating labor market saturation. The second cycle of economically stimulated rising prices for Cuban slaves occurred after 1850 because of increasing real sugar prices on international markets. Cuban slave prices soared after 1850 and entered a period of sharp fluctuations, albeit at higher levels than prevailing before midcentury.

Much of the post-1850 instability in slave prices was the result of political factors including the antislaving activities of Great Britain and Spain, the U.S. Civil War, and the beginning of the Ten Years' War which heralded the onset of the abolition process.