Cuban Missile Crisis long range missile
The island of Cuba has been lived in for about several thousand years by Amerindian peoples named the Taino and Ciboney. The Taino were known to be mostly farmers while the Ciboney were hunter-gatherers. The moniker Cuba in fact is derived from the Taino word cubanacan, which means "a central place”. Christopher Columbus sighted the island in the period of his foremost sail of discovery on 24 October 1492, and at once laid claim it for Spain.
Spain owned the island of Cuba for 388 years, ruled by the governor of Havana. It had an economic base of orchard agriculture and main exportations of sugar, coffee and tobacco to European Community and later on to North America. British grabbed the island in 1762, but gave it to Spain the following year. Like most of the Spanish Empire, a minor land-owning elect of colonists kept all the social and economic force. They were attended to by a universe of small farmers, laborers and slaves.
Many architectural masterpieces constructed in the period of Spanish rule still stand nowadays. An first-class illustration is the Catedral de San Cristobal, Havana. During the 1820s, when the rest of Spain’s empire in South America rebelled and seceeded, Cuba stayed loyal, although a select few fought for independence. Partly because fears of a slave rebellion (as had materialized in Haiti) if the Spanish pulled away, partly because the prosperity of Cuban colonists counted on their export trade to Europe, and partially because Cuba feared the surfacing power of the United States more than they disliked Spanish colonial regulation.
Due to the fact that Cuba is a bare 90 miles from the United States has had a sound influence on the lands development. Politicians in the south diagrammed the island’s annexation as a means of bolstering the pro-slavery forces in the U.S. throughout the early 1900’s. In 1848 a pro-annexationist rising was foiled after a few failed invasion atemps from Florida turned up fruitless. After that the United States tried to buy Cuba from Spain but was always turned down.
Rural impoverishment in Spain led to a major Spanish expatriation to Cuba. Among people inbound were the parents of Fidel Castro. During the 1890s pro-independence agitation vivified, fueled by rancour of the restrictions enforced on Cuban trade by Spain and antagonism to Spain’s more and more tyrannical and unskilled governance of Cuba. On 15 July 1895 uprising erupted and the independence party, led by Tomas Estrada Palma and the poet Jose Marti, proclaimed Cuba an sovereign republic. Marti was killed briefly thereafter and has become Cuba’s unquestioned national hero.
This abbreviated paper can’t possibly address the vast history that is Cuba. I have named various first-class books at the end of this website. You can locate them all at Amazon or your local bookstore.
Cuba: A New History by Richard Gott
The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Latin America Readers) by Aviva Chomsky, Barry Carr, and Pamela Maria Smorkaloff
This is Cuba: An Outlaw Culture Survives by Ben Corbett
Inside Cuba by Julio Cesar Perez Hernandez, Angelika Taschen, and Giani Bosso
