[1] The first wave of French immigrants to arrive in Cuba were fleeing the Haitian Revolution and the new governmental administration of Haiti after independence was declared.
Many of them emigrated to the city of Santiago de Cuba, which had neither sidewalks nor paved streets, and lacked drinking water, supplies and dwellings for the refugees.
Sebastián Kindelán y O’Regan, governor of Santiago, reported five hundred thousand coffee plants being cultivated on the island; the crop's yield of ten million pounds that year would be quadrupled in 1810.
The exact number of French persons expelled from Santiago de Cuba is unknown, most of them moved to the southern United States, especially Louisiana.
Between 1818 and 1835 a third wave of immigration to Santiago de Cuba occurred, prompted by a royal order from the Spanish Crown intended to increase the proportion of whites in the Cuban population.
With the general increase in mercantile activity, many new shops of all sorts were opened and tradesmen found a larger market for their products or labor.
[2] In July 1844, he surveyed the Santiago-Cobre line built to transport ore from the island's only copper mine to the port of Santiago,[3] a railway project for the Eastern Department, the first of its kind in the region, according to historian Laura Cruz Ríos.
The French still had a presence in diverse sectors of the Cuban economy throughout the 19th century, especially in commercial trade, but also in agriculture, marine shipping, and the professions, including medicine, engineering, law, and pedagogy.