ABOUT CUBA
WHY CUBA?(Coming Soon)
HISTORY:
Cuba's first inhabitants were indigenous people who arrived by sea, following the trade winds westward from the coast of Venezuela along the islands of the Caribbean. Little evidence remains of the first indigenous people, the Ciboney (or Guanahacabibe), who began settling the island about 1000 BC. The Ciboney lived along the coast and survived by fishing, hunting, and gathering plant foods. They lived in small, seminomadic clans and left no written record of their society, religions, or languages.
A more warlike group, the Arawak, reached Cuba in two waves, beginning with the sub-Ta?s, who arrived about AD 900, gradually pushing the Ciboney to the western third of the island. The Arawaks lived in thatched houses and were governed by caciques (tribal chiefs). They survived by fishing and collectively working gardens, where they grew cassava, maize (corn), beans, sweet potatoes, yucca, tomatoes, and pineapples. They also grew tobacco, which they used for religious ceremonies and medicinal purposes. A second migratory wave, the Ta?s, swept into the eastern coastal area of Cuba from the neighboring island of Hispaniola in the 15th century, just before the Spanish conquest.
When explorer Christopher Columbus reached the island on October 27, 1492, Cuba's indigenous population numbered approximately 112,000, with 92,000 sub-Ta?s, 10,000 Ta?s, and 10,000 Ciboney. Columbus claimed the island for Spain, the nation that had sponsored his voyage.
PEOPLE / CULTURE:
The population of the Dominican Republic is predominantly mulatto, and there are small black and white minorities. Few people are descended, even indirectly, from the indigenous Taino peoples, who were largely decimated by disease, warfare, and the effects of forced labour shortly after their first contact with Europeans.
The largest island of the West Indies group (equal in area to Pennsylvania), Cuba is also the westernmost—just west of Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), and 90 mi (145 km) south of Key West, Fla., at the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico. The island is mountainous in the southeast and south-central area (Sierra Maestra). It is flat or rolling elsewhere. Cuba also includes numerous smaller islands, islets, and cays.
The island thus occupies a very important strategic position, commanding, as it does, the entrances to the Gulf of Mexico. It has a length of almost 750 miles from east to west, and its width varies from 100 miles, at the eastern end, to 30 miles in the western portion. Its area is about 45,000 square miles, including the Isle of Pines, which lies immediately south of its western extremity. It is therefore a little less in size than the State of Virginia, and about the size of England. It is divided politically into six provinces in the following order from west to east: Pinar del Río, Havana, Matanzas, Santa Clara, Puerto Príncipe (Camagüey), and Santiago de Cuba.
Cristofolo Colombo discovered Cuba October 27, 1492, and gives the name of Juana inthe honour of the first-born son of Catholic Kings, in that first trip recognized the east of the island and in its second trip the southern coast traveled advancing a lot toward the occident, however, until its death he believed - or he wanted to believe - that Cuba was not an island but rather it was part of the continent. Sebastián Ocampo is owed the first complete turn-around of the island, carried out in 1509, although already from 1498 it was believed that it was an island as a result of a secret trip attributed to Alonso of Ojeda or Vicente Yañez Pinzón accompanied by Juan de la Cosa. Sebastián Ocampo's turn-aroud navigation cleared all the doubts about the insularity of Cuba and also clear the mystery halo that wrapped it, according to him -Ocampo - the indigenous population was peaceful, and exist good cultivation lands and good bays like those of Jagua (Cienfuegos) and Havana and this knowledge opened finally the route to the colonization of the island.
The War of Ten Years began October 10, 1868 with the Scream of Yara (Grito de Yara) given by Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, a rich and learned farmer of oriental region, and it extended until May of 1878 when was signed the Pact of the Zanjon among the Cuban and Spanish forces, pact that was refuted by the General Antonio Maceo in the well know "Protesta of Baragua" called himself and not accepted by other heroes of the war like General Calixto García. The war got rid fundamentally obviously in the oriental and central region of the island where the cane plantations and the economy suffered an enormous damage, being practically intact the occident of the country.