LA AMISTAD MOVIE

1. What is the movie about? Summarize the plot of the film mentioning the main characters.

               The movie is about the real slave ship called "La Amistad" which travelled from Cuba to the Unites States in 1839. Cinqué, a black man from the ship and the protagonist of the film, took over the ship with other slaves. The navigators sailed into Unites States territories where the American Navy captured them. The Africans find themselves in a legal battle there without knowing nothing of that lenguage.
                Holabird brings charges of piracy and murder, Forsyth, represents the claim of Queen Isabella II of Spain that the Africans are slaves and are property of Spain based on a treaty.
A lawyer named Roger Sherman Baldwin, hired by the abolitionist Lewis Tappan and his black associate Theodore Joadson, decides to defend the Africans.  
Baldwin proves through documents found hidden aboard La Amistad that the African people were  belonging to a Portuguese slave ship.




2. What was the Triangular Trade? What nations benefited from it?

 The 'Triangular Trade' was called like this because it was three-sided, involving voyages from:

• England to Africa
• Africa to the Americas
• The Americas back to England

The Triangular Trade is a term used to describe the trade occurring between England, Africa, and the Americas. The trade fell into the three categories:

• The raw materials and natural resources such as sugar, tobacco, rice and cotton that were found in the 13 colonies.
• Manufactured products from England and Europe such as guns, clothes and beads
• Slaves from West Africa, many of whom worked in the Slave Plantations

3. Do some research and explain the conditions in which slaves were captured and transported from Africa to the Americas.

The Atlantic slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people, mainly to the Americas. The slave trade regularly used the triangular trade route and existed from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The majority of them were people from Central and Western Africa, who had been sold by other West Africans to Western European slave traders, who brought them to the Americas. The South Atlantic and Caribbean economies especially were dependent on the supply of secure labour for the production of commodity crops, making goods and clothing to sell in Europe. This was crucial to those western European countries which, in the late 17th and 18th centuries, were vying with each other to create overseas empires. 




4. What enlightened ideas appear in the movie?

• It describes the Africans capture, their enslavement, their purchase, the overthrow of their captors and the subsequent trials in America.
• The film succeeds on the basis of two core themes, suffering and survival. The enslaved Africans are not represented as supplicants: they have fought for their freedom. 
• The U.S. Judicial System: The initial hearing of the Amistad case took place before a U.S. Circuit Court which referred it to the (lower) District Court as a civil case. The District Court ruled that the Africans be turned over to the President for return to Africa.
• Slavery and the Abolitionist Movement

5. Who was Joseph Cinqué? Did he really exist? 

He was was born in Mani in present-day Sierra Leone in 1813/1814.  He was a rice farmer and trader, and at the time of his capture he had a wife and three children. He was sold to Pedro Blanco, a Spanish slave trader.  He was imprisoned on the Portuguese slave ship Tecora. Cinqué was taken to Havana, Cuba, where he was sold with 110 others to Spaniards José Ruiz and Pedro Montez.

6. What is the role of John Quincy Adams, former US President, in the movie?

American Diplomat and politician who became the sixth president of the United States (1825-1829). He formulated the thesis known in Cuban history as the policy of "ripe fruit", according to which Cuba because of its geographical proximity, should fall into the hands of the U.S. 

He was the son of the second U.S. president, John Adams. As a diplomat he was involved in numerous international negotiations, and as Secretary of State, he participated in the creation of the Monroe Doctrine.

Adams went before the Supreme Court on behalf of African slaves who had revolted and seized the Spanish ship Amistad.