In the more than five hundred years of Western expansion, scarcely
another imperial history has stirred up as passionate a dispute as that
of the Spanish empire in the Americas. Long-standing and acrimonious,
the beginnings of this dispute can be traced back to the beginnings of the
Spanish Empire itself, when Bartolomé de Las Casas painfully recounted
some of the horrors of colonization in his Brevísima relación de la destrucción
de las Indias (1552), a book that decisively contributed to the international
condemnation of Spanish history known as the “Black Legend.” The Latin
American Wars of Independence at the beginning of the nineteenth century
were also an occasion to stage bitter criticisms of Spain’s New World empire,
as was the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898.