lA CUBANITA BUS SERVICE
The island of Cuba has been domiciled 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 in the period of his most important ocean trip of discovery on 24 October 1492, and immediately claimed it for Spain.
Spain owned the island of Cuba for 388 years, dominated by the governor of Havana. It had an economic base of plantation agriculture and main exports of refined sugar, coffee and tobacco to European Community and later on to North America. Brits seized the island in 1762, but returned it to Spain the following year. Like most of the Spanish Empire, a minor land-owning elect of settlers maintained all the social and economic force. They were serviced by a population of modest farmers, laborers and slaves.
Many architectural masterpieces reconstructed in the period of Spanish rule still stand today. An excellent illustration is the Catedral de San Cristobal, Havana. During the 1820s, when the rest of Spain’s conglomerate in South America renegaded and seceeded, Cuba remained loyal, although a few fought for independence. Partly because concerns of a slave rising (as had happened in Haiti) if the Spanish withdrew, partly because the prosperity of Cuban settlers counted on their export trade to Europe, and partially because Cuba feared the growing power of the United States more than they disliked Spanish colonial reign.
Due to the fact that Cuba is a slender 90 miles from the United States has had a wakeless influence on the nations growth. Politicians in the south plotted 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 rebellion was foiled after several failed invasion atemps from Florida turned up fruitless. After that the United States attempted to buy Cuba from Spain but was universally declined.
Rural poverty in Spain led to a substantial Spanish emigration to Cuba. Among people arriving were the parents of Fidel Castro. During the 1890s pro-independence upheaval revived, fueled by bitterness of the restrictions levied on Cuban trade by Spain and hostility to Spain’s progressively tyrannous and incapable governance of Cuba. On 15 July 1895 uprising broke out and the independence party, led by Tomas Estrada Palma and the poet Jose Marti, extolled Cuba an sovereign republic. Marti was killed briefly thereafter and has become Cuba’s unchallenged national hero.
This abbreviated article can’t possibly address the huge story that is Cuba. I have named various excellent books at the closing of this site. 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
