| Summary: | The Spanish Antilles were an exception in the independence process in the Americas. This article deals with the case of Cuba, where the Havanna elites, in full economic expansion with the sugar business, promoted a Junta in 1808, the first one in the New World. This Junta failed eventually, due to the threat of divisions in the hegemonic social group, to the use of crowds by one of its factions, and to the intervention of groups of black people in the outcries. The author offers a reconstruction of this process and links the experience with certain demands in which doctrinary aspects become inseparable from group interests; at every moment, the analysis highlights the relation between social conditions and the expression of a consciousness in process of formation.
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