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The island of Cuba has been inhabited for the last 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 in the period of his number one ocean trip of discovery on 24 October 1492, and forthwith 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 plantation farming and main exportations of refined sugar, coffee bean 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 minute land-owning elect of colonists held all the social and economic power. They were attended to by a universe of small farmers, laborers and slaves.
Many architectural masterpieces built in the period of Spanish rule still stand nowadays. An first-class model is the Catedral de San Cristobal, Havana. During the 1820s, when the rest of Spain’s empire in South America arose and seceeded, Cuba persisted loyal, though a select few pressed for independence. Partly because concerns of a slave insurrection (as had materialised in Haiti) if the Spanish pulled away, partly because the prosperity of Cuban settlers counted on their export trade to Europe, and partly because Cuba feared the emerging power of the United States more than they disliked Spanish colonial reign.
Due to the fact that Cuba is a mere 90 miles from the United States has had a fundamental influence on the lands maturation. Politicians in the south planned 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 rebellion was foiled after many failed invasion atemps from Florida proved fruitless. After that the United States attempted to buy Cuba from Spain but was always turned away.
Rural poverty in Spain led to a significant Spanish expatriation to Cuba. Among people arriving were the parents of Fidel Castro. During the 1890s pro-independence agitation resuscitated, fueled by bitterness of the restrictions imposed on Cuban trade by Spain and hostility to Spain’s increasingly oppressive and unskilled administration of Cuba. On 15 July 1895 rebellion erupted and the independence party, led by Tomas Estrada Palma and the poet Jose Marti, proclaimed Cuba an independent republic. Marti was killed briefly thereafter and has become Cuba’s unchallenged national hero.
This abbreviated article can’t possibly address the vast history that is Cuba. I have numbered various excellent books at the end of this web page. You can buy 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
