playa costa verde cuba
The island of Cuba has been occupied for more than several thousand years by Amerindian peoples known as 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 while on his foremost ocean trip of discovery on 24 October 1492, and forthwith laid claim it for Spain.
Spain possessed the island of Cuba for 388 years, ruled by the governor of Havana. It had an economic base of grove farming and main exports of sugar, java and tobacco to Europe and down the road to North America. British people took over the island in 1762, but delivered it to Spain the following year. Like most of the Spanish Empire, a minute land-owning elite of settlers retained all the social and economic might. They were attended to by a population of modest farmers, laborers and slaves.
Many architectural masterpieces constructed in the period of 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 select few crusaded for independence. Partly because fears of a slave rising (as had happened in Haiti) if the Spanish withdrew, partly because the prosperity of Cuban colonists depended on their exportation trade to Europe, and partly because Cuba dreaded the developing power of the United States more than they disliked Spanish colonial rule.
Due to the fact that Cuba is a slender 90 miles from the United States has had a profound influence on the areas evolution. Politicians in the south plotted 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 turned up fruitless. After that the United States sought to buy Cuba from Spain but was universally turned away.
Rural poverty in Spain led to a major Spanish emigration to Cuba. Among those arriving were the parents of Fidel Castro. During the 1890s pro-independence unrest vivified, fueled by bitterness of the restrictions levied on Cuban trade by Spain and hostility to Spain’s increasingly tyrannous and bungling administration of Cuba. On 15 July 1895 rebellion erupted and the independence party, led by Tomas Estrada Palma and the poet Jose Marti, extolled Cuba an independent republic. Marti was killed not far thereafter and has become Cuba’s undisputed national hero.
This brief paper can’t possibly address the immense chronicle that is Cuba. I have named many first-class books at the closing of this site. You can discover 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
