The Island of Movement, Cuba

Cuba is the island of movement.  The movement of dancers’ feet to the smooth rhythms of the salsa, the movement of the swirling tornadoes that lash its coast, and the movement of the pages of history, which unfurl faster here than almost anywhere else in the world.

For most of Cuba’s history, the Taino people made this large island their home.  They lived for more than a thousand years here.  They had no kings and all wealth was shared.  They played a ceremonial ball game named batey, worshipped ancestor spirits called Zemi and painted their faces frightening colours when they went to war.  At least, that’s what later Spanish writers tell us.

Then, on October 27, 1492, Christopher Columbus, on a mission pastronised by the Spanish crown, arrived in Cuba.  Following him came the Spanish, carrying in the hulks of their galleons gunpowder, chains, and deadly germs.  The Taino quickly succumbed to these warlike people.  Many fell to their swords, more died from their plagues, and those who were left were enslaved.  Their rich culture was subsumed into that of their Spanish conquerors and shines out only in glimpses today, especially in the language of the colonisers.  English words such as hammock, barbecue, hurricane and savannah all come from Taino, via Spanish.

After the wholesale destruction of the Taino, the Spanish began importing kidnapped Africans to man their plantations.  Over three centuries, an estimated 1.3 million people were taken here to live a life of backbreaking labour and unimaginable misery, harvesting sugarcane.  Today, over 65% of Cuba’s population has enslaved Africans in their ancestry. 

For almost three centuries, most in Cuba worked to make the owners of the island’s vast latifundias (or great estates growing cash crops) rich and keep the markets of Europe overflowing with sugar and tobacco.  But eventually, dissatisfaction brews, and the people of this island begin to clamour for change, and a future free from the grasping hands of the Spanish crown.

In 1868, Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, a wealthy and powerful landowner, freed his slaves and organized a rebellion, encouraging the island’s destitute to rise against the Spanish crown in the cause of independence.  So begins the grueling Ten-Year War, and whilst there were ups and downs for both sides, the Spanish managed to keep their grip on the island.  However, in 1886, the rebels won a key demand: slavery was finally abolished.

The same story repeats in the Little War, another uprising easily crushed.  Then, in 1895, Jose Marti, poet, philosopher and freedom fighter, galvanized his people, and a final war was fought against the Spanish. 

Former slaves, poor farmers, and the urban working class all joined the fight, and, despite an increasingly desperate and brutal Spanish campaign against innocent citizens, they held to the cause.

Then 1898, as war raged across Cuba, an American battleship, the USS Maine, exploded in Havana harbour.  The Americans blamed the Spanish, and the Spanish-American War began.  In just a few months, the ancient Spanish empire was defeated, and Cuba was occupied by the Americans.  Finally, in 1902, Cuba gained its independence.

Cuba has independence, but it will have to fight tooth and nail to keep its autonomy.  Even after leaving, the Americans forced the Cuban government to adopt the Platt Amendment, which turned Cuba into a client state:  most of the mines and plantations of Cuba were in American hands, they were given access to a military base in Guantanamo Bay for perpetuity and they had the right to intervene in internal Cuba affairs whenever they see fit.

In 1932, the Platt Amendment was repealed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, though America maintained economic dominance over the island.  There was talk of democracy until a soldier named Sergeant Fulgencio Batista instigated a coup.  Batista was replaced by a democratic constitution in the 1940s, but in 1952, he once again came to power.

Backed by the America government, the Cuban elite and gangsters from New York and Chicago, Batista ruled with an iron fist, and the Cuban people found themselves once again under the oppressor’s boot.  Still, deep underground, resistance grows, and the people of Cuba begin to plot the dictator’s downfall.