thirteen days of the cuban missile crisis
The island of Cuba has been domiciled for around several thousand years by Amerindian peoples referred to as 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 possessed the island of Cuba for 388 years, ruled by the governor of Havana. It had an economic base of grove agribusiness and main exportations of refined sugar, coffee bean and tobacco to Europe and later to North America. British people captured the island in 1762, but returned it to Spain the following year. Like most of the Spanish Empire, a modest land-owning elite of settlers kept all the social and economic might. They were serviced by a population of small farmers, laborers and slaves.
Many architectural masterpieces built during Spanish rule still stand today. An first-class case is the Catedral de San Cristobal, Havana. During the 1820s, when the rest of Spain’s empire in South America rose up and seceeded, Cuba rested loyal, although a select few campaigned for independence. Partly because fears of a slave rising (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 ascending 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 wakeless influence on the nations development. Politicians in the south plotted the island’s annexation as a means of supporting the pro-slavery forces in the U.S. throughout the early 1900’s. In 1848 a pro-annexationist rebellion was defeated after various failed invasion atemps from Florida proved fruitless. After that the United States sought to buy Cuba from Spain but was universally rejected.
Rural impoverishment in Spain led to a substantial Spanish emigration to Cuba. Among people arriving were the parents of Fidel Castro. During the 1890s pro-independence unrest revived, fueled by rancour of the restrictions brought down on Cuban trade by Spain and antagonism to Spain’s more and more tyrannical and fumbling administration 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 independent republic. Marti was killed shortly thereafter and has become Cuba’s undisputed national hero.
This abbreviated article can’t possibly address the immense history that is Cuba. I have named many first-class books at the closing of this web page. You can locate them all at Amazon or your local bookshop.
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
