After it had been abandoned, in the 19th century a British company acquired the mine and reopened it, again using slaves and free coloured labourers, but also using skilled Cornish miners and steam engines from Cornwall to operate pumps.

[2] The Cobre Mine is about 12 miles (19 km) north west of Santiago Bay in the Sierra Maestra.

[5] The mine was reached by mule train from Punta de Sol until the early 1860s, when a small railway was opened.

[5] The Spanish forced the local indigenous people to work the mine, and imported slaves from Africa.

[6] During the first decades of the 17th century copper from the mine, worked by slaves of African origin, was a major source of export revenue.

However, the Spanish crown confiscated the mines in 1670 after the private contractor had failed to comply with the terms of his contract and had neglected them for years.

[4] Early in the 1830s a British visitor to the region assayed some of the mine's waste and found it rich in copper.

Jenkin offered £100 per year plus free lodging, to young, fit, sober and single men, mostly from the mining areas around Camborne, Illogan and Redruth.

[9] The Cornish workers lived in one-storey adobe wattle houses on the edge of the town near the mines.

Insects could enter the houses freely, bringing tropical diseases to which the Cornish had no immunity, particularly yellow fever.

Most of the Cornish were Wesleyan Methodists, and wanted to hold services and meetings according to their traditions, but anything other than the Catholic faith was illegal in Cuba.

A Protestant burial ground was opened since the Cornish, considered heretics, could not be buried in the Catholic cemetery.

[4] After news reached Cornwall about the deaths from fever and higher wages at other mines the number of Cornish recruits dropped.

[4] In the period up to the end of World War I (1914–18) the copper was mostly extracted by labourers from Spain and shipped to the United States.

Depletion of the ore forced deeper and more expensive extraction, and this combined with falling copper prices led to the decision to close the mine in 2001.

[citation needed] From the time mining began in 1544 to the end of operations in 1998 over 3 million tonnes of ore were extracted, with grades of 2% to 20% copper.