Cuba

Long before the arrival of European ships, Cuba was inhabited by three indigenous peoples: the Guanahatabey, the oldest inhabitants of the western tip; the Siboney, hunter-gatherers who settled across the island; and most significantly, the Taíno — an Arawakan-speaking people who arrived from South America and the Lesser Antilles and built the most sophisticated society Cuba had ever seen.

The Taíno called the island Caobana or Cuba — believed to mean “where fertile land is abundant.” They organised into chiefdoms called cacicazgos, led by chiefs called caciques. Their agricultural knowledge was extraordinary: they cultivated cassava, maize, sweet potato, tobacco, and cotton, and their word for the hammock — hamaca — entered European languages permanently.

Tobacco was not merely a crop but a sacred ritual plant. The Taíno smoked rolled leaves in cohíba — a word that would survive for centuries and ultimately become synonymous with Cuba’s finest cigars. Their spiritual world was governed by zemis, ancestral spirits whose influence could be seen in the sky, rivers, and stones.

When Columbus made landfall on October 27, 1492, he described the island as “the most beautiful land human eyes have ever seen.” Within five decades, the Taíno population — once estimated at over 100,000 — had been reduced to near extinction through disease, forced labour, and violence. Their language, however, survived: words like canoe, barbecue, hurricane, savanna, and tobacco are all Taíno gifts to the world.

The post-1762 opening of Cuba’s ports transformed the island’s economy with terrifying speed. Sugar became King, and slavery became its instrument. Between 1790 and 1820 alone, an estimated 325,000 enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to Cuba. By the mid-19th century, Cuba had become the world’s single largest sugar producer, supplying a third of global demand.

The ingenio — the Cuban sugar mill — became one of the most efficient and brutal industrial operations in the Americas. Early steam technology was adopted faster in Cuba than almost anywhere else in the world. Cuba had the Caribbean’s first railway, built in 1837 — before Spain itself — to move sugar from the interior fields to coastal ports faster and cheaper.

By the 1840s, enslaved Africans outnumbered Cuba’s white population. The enslaved brought with them the seeds of what would become Cuban culture: the rhythms of West African Yoruba and Congo traditions blended with Spanish music to create son, rumba, and the root of everything that followed. The Afro-Cuban religion of Santería — blending Yoruba deities with Catholic saints — took shape in the barracks and communities of the enslaved and endures as a living spiritual tradition today.

The slave trade to Cuba was nominally abolished in 1820 under British pressure, but continued illegally for decades. Slavery itself was not abolished until 1886 — one of the last countries in the Western Hemisphere to do so — leaving a legacy of racial inequality that shaped Cuban society into the 20th century and beyond.

The Cuban Republic was proclaimed on May 20, 1902, but sovereignty was circumscribed from the start. The Platt Amendment and the heavy weight of US corporate investment — in sugar, railways, utilities, and land — meant that Cuba’s politics were deeply shaped by Washington’s preferences. Political instability, corruption, and US military interventions marked the early republic.

The 1920s and 1930s brought cultural flowering alongside political turmoil. Havana became the nightlife capital of the Americas — a city of jazz clubs, casinos, cabarets, and rumba halls. Benny Moré’s big band, the birth of the son, and the extraordinary creativity of Afro-Cuban musicians made Havana’s soundscape the envy of the world. The Tropicana Cabaret, opened in 1939, became a symbol of the era’s glamour.

Fulgencio Batista first came to power in a 1933 coup and ruled or manipulated Cuban politics for two decades. His second seizure of power in March 1952 — a coup that cancelled scheduled elections — proved his last. Batista’s regime was characterised by corruption, repression, and close ties to organised crime. Meyer Lansky and the American Mafia ran casinos across Havana, and the island’s political contradictions — extraordinary wealth and extreme poverty, sophisticated culture and brutal dictatorship — became impossible to sustain.

For many Cubans, Batista’s Havana was a city of Almendrones — the great American cars that flooded the island in the 1950s: Chevrolets, Cadillacs, Buicks, and Fords. When the Revolution came, parts and imports stopped. Those cars, maintained by Cuban ingenuity and necessity, became the island’s most iconic image — rolling museums of an interrupted modernity.

The Special Period forced Cuba to open its economy to dollar tourism and limited foreign investment for the first time since 1959. Paladares — private family restaurants — became legal. Casas particulares (private home rentals, Cuba’s pre-Airbnb Airbnb) proliferated. A dual-currency system separated tourist dollars from the Cuban peso, creating sharp divisions in living standards.

Fidel Castro formally transferred power to his brother Raúl Castro in 2008, who introduced cautious economic liberalisation: small businesses were permitted, travel restrictions eased for Cubans, and property sales between Cubans were legalised for the first time since the revolution. In 2014–2015, Barack Obama’s administration and Havana agreed to normalise relations — embassies reopened, travel restrictions loosened, and an era of cautious optimism began.

The Trump administration reversed much of this progress from 2017–2021, adding Cuba back to the State Sponsor of Terrorism list and tightening restrictions. By the early 2020s, Cuba was facing its worst economic crisis since the Special Period: power blackouts lasting 18–20 hours daily, fuel shortages, and mass emigration. The population of 11 million has seen hundreds of thousands leave in recent years — the largest Cuban emigration since the Mariel boatlift of 1980.

Fidel Castro died on November 25, 2016. Cuba has been led by Miguel Díaz-Canel since 2018, the first non-Castro to lead the country in over 60 years. The island is in a state of profound transition — economically stressed but culturally extraordinary, geopolitically significant but domestically stretched. Its relationship with Jamaica, CARICOM, and the wider Caribbean remains one of the most complex and important in the region.