Slavery in Cuba ended on October 7, 1886, when a Spanish royal decree released the last people still held under the apprenticeship system that had replaced it six years earlier. Cuba had become the largest slave economy in the Spanish empire and one of the last places in the Americas where both the trade and the institution survived. Spain had signed treaties against the Atlantic slave trade decades before and had done little to enforce them, and the Cuban sugar planters had the political weight and the money to keep the system going long after their competitors in the British and French colonies had lost theirs.
What forced the change was the Ten Years' War of 1868 to 1878, which began as an independence uprising in the eastern provinces and turned into a war about slavery as well. Abolitionists in Madrid argued that the colonies could not be held by force forever. The Cortes passed the Moret law in 1870, freeing children born to enslaved mothers from that year and anyone over 60, and slavery was ended in Puerto Rico in 1873. In Cuba, where the planters had more influence, the law of 1880 created patronato: masters kept the labour of the people they had owned, now with pay, and the arrangement was to run until 1888.
The register was closed early. A decree in 1886 cut the last two years off it, and the people still entered under patronato were released that October. Most had been born enslaved. They had known nothing else.
Freedom came without land. Freed people in Cuba had few rights to credit, votes or property, and a great many of them went on working on the same estates for wages, joined by indentured labourers brought in from China and from the Yucatan. Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, in May 1888, a year and a half later. The question of who had paid for the sugar, and who had profited from it, stayed unresolved and fed into the independence war that began in 1895.