HISTORY: BEFORE THE REVOLUTION

"One of the most rich and desirable possessions existing in the world" — General Leonard Wood, 1901

Cubans sometimes refer to their homeland as the "sleeping alligator" because of its shape. This imaginary creature lies at the western end of the Antilles chain of Caribbean islands, close to the jaws of the Gulf of Mexico. Haiti is just 60 miles east and Key West, the southernmost point of the continental United States, 90 miles to the north. Cuba occupies about the same area as England but stretches over 745 miles from end to end. The capital, Havana, where more than two million of the island's population of eleven million live, sits on the northwestern coast, near where the alligator's tail meets its body.

The island is largely low-lying, with great swathes of central Cuba given over to sugar and citrus plantations. Europeans cross the Atlantic Ocean in order to lie on Cuba's beaches for two weeks, but the country's greatest natural assets are its mountains. There are three main ranges — the Cordillera de Guaniguanico in the west, the central Escambray mountains, and the more rugged Sierra Maestra, which extends along the southeastern coast and sheltered Fidel Castro and his fellow rebels during their guerrilla campaign in the 1950s.

Thousands of islands pepper the waters around Cuba. Most of these show up merely as pinpricks on a map, but the largest encompasses an area of about 890 square miles: this is the Isla de la Juventud or Island of Youth. Once known as the Isla del Tesoro ("Treasure Island") — the inspiration for the title of Robert Louis Stevenson's famous tale of adventure — and the Isla de los Pinos ("Isle of Pines"), the island was given its new name in 1978 in recognition of the thousands of foreign students working and studying there.

First Encounters

Archaeology provides scant rewards in Cuba. The piecing together of the island's early history relies much more on conjecture than on concrete evidence.

Tribes from Central or South America arrived in waves from around 1000BC, possibly even earlier. The Siboneys settled first, making their homes in caves and living off fishing. They survived only in the west of the island at the time of the Conquest, having been forced into a corner by the fiercer Tamos, a tribe of Arawak Indians who came from the Orinoco basin on the South American mainland — some as late as 1460. The Tamos farmed and made ceramic pots, activities that represented the peak of sophistication in pre-Columbian Cuba. They enslaved the less-advanced Siboneys but were a peaceable tribe, ill-disposed to take much of a stand against the European conquistadores.

Christopher Columbus caught his first glimpse of Cuba on October 27, 1492 and declared that he had "never seen anything so beautiful." Convinced that he had reached the Asian continent of the Great Khan, he sent his men off in search of "a king and great cities." They found only small villages of thatched huts — the so-called bohíos, which still pepper the Cuban countryside — and people inhaling the smoke of "certain herbs": this was the Europeans' first encounter with tobacco, one of the few legacies left by the Indians.

The Takeover

Spain showed little interest in Cuba at first. Occupation by the Europeans began finally in 1511, when Diego Velasquez disembarked with 300 men near Guantanamo Bay in the southeast. It was a swift and cruel affair which was wrapped up by 1514. The only real resistance was led by Hatuey, a fearsome Indian from the neighboring island of Hispaniola, who tried to rally the Tamos by recounting tales of the Spanish atrocities from which he and others had fled. His reception was lukewarm, however, and he was eventually caught. Hatuey preferred death by fire to conversion to the Christianity of his captors.

The early conquistadores came merely in search of easy spoils, and as soon as Cuba's gold ran out many of them headed off to the richer pastures of Mexico and Peru. Only geography prevented complete neglect of the island. Placed neatly at the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico, Cuba was crucial in protecting Spanish ships traveling between the New World colonies and Europe against attack by foreign fleets and pirates. The fledgling capital of Havana soon boasted Latin America's most formidable collection of fortresses and became the assembly point for Spanish ships heading back across the Atlantic.

Away from the hubbub of maritime activity in Havana, development was haphazard. The encomienda system, which gave the first colonizers a piece of land and a certain number of Indians to work it, was a feudal system infinitely worse than anything that existed in Spain. It forced the indigenous people into a life of slavery which in the end destroyed them; those who did not die of malnutrition, disease, or maltreatment, killed themselves.

Slaves were shipped in from Africa to replace the depleted workforce. Many ended up on sugar plantations, where they were obliged to live like animals in huts called barracones. Slave-owners forced the strongest, healthiest men to breed with the fittest women to produce children whom they could then sell for a good price at auction. Rebellious slaves, known as cimarrones, fled their infernal lives and formed communities called palenques, mostly in the mountainous Oriente. A few lucky Africans were able to buy their liberty, while others were released by masters undergoing deathbed repentances.

A Case of Monopoly

The island's economy made only slow progress during the early colonial period, and until the eighteenth century Cuba's claim to be "The Pearl of the Antilles" was largely wishful thinking. It was foreign intervention that finally woke Cuba from its torpor.

Spain had faced competition from other European powers in the Caribbean for some time, and in 1762 the British finally managed to capture Havana. They returned the city to Spain in exchange for Florida after just eleven months, but during their short stay managed to change the course of Cuban history. By dropping the trade restrictions that had banned the island from doing business with any country other than Spain, the British opened up a new market for their merchants and helped to launch Cuba's export trade.

Back in Spanish hands, Cuba's economy received another unexpected boost in 1791, when a slave uprising in the French-ruled half of Hispaniola, now Haiti, destroyed that territory's sugar industry. Almost overnight, Cuba took over the role as the largest producer of sugar in the Caribbean. The island's hardwood forests and grazing lands disappeared beneath a blanket of sugar-cane. In 1818, a royal decree opened Cuban ports to international trade and fueled the sugar boom...