blinked in the cuban missile crisis
The island of Cuba has been occupied for about several thousand years by Amerindian peoples called the Taino and Ciboney. The Taino were known to be mostly farmers while the Ciboney were hunter-gatherers. The epithet Cuba in fact is derived from the Taino word cubanacan, which means "a central place”. Christopher Columbus sighted the island during his most important sail of discovery on 24 October 1492, and instantly claimed it for Spain.
Spain ruled the island of Cuba for 388 years, dominated by the governor of Havana. It had an economic base of grove agribusiness and main exportations of refined sugar, java and tobacco to Europe and afterwards to North America. British people grabbed the island in 1762, but returned it to Spain the following year. Like most of the Spanish Empire, a minute land-owning elect of colonists retained all the social and economic might. They were attended to by a population of small farmers, laborers and slaves.
Many architectural masterpieces constructed during Spanish rule still stand today. An first-class example is the Catedral de San Cristobal, Havana. During the 1820s, when the rest of Spain’s conglomerate in South America rebelled and seceeded, Cuba remained loyal, though a few crusaded for independence. Partly because fears of a slave insurrection (as had materialized in Haiti) if the Spanish disengaged, partly because the prosperity of Cuban colonists counted on their exportation trade to Europe, and partially because Cuba feared the mounting 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 unfathomed influence on the areas exploitation. Politicians in the south diagrammed the island’s annexation as a way of bolstering the pro-slavery forces in the U.S. throughout the early 1900’s. In 1848 a pro-annexationist uprising was defeated after many failed invasion atemps from Florida proved fruitless. After that the United States tried to buy Cuba from Spain but was always rejected.
Rural impoverishment in Spain led to a real 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 imposed on Cuban trade by Spain and hostility to Spain’s more and more tyrannical and bungling governance of Cuba. On 15 July 1895 uprising erupted and the independence party, led by Tomas Estrada Palma and the poet Jose Marti, exclaimed Cuba an sovereign republic. Marti was killed not far thereafter and has become Cuba’s unquestioned national hero.
This abbreviated article can’t possibly address the vast account that is Cuba. I have numbered various excellent books at the close of this web page. You can get them all at Amazon or your local bookstall.
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
