cuba history .org - History of Cuban Nation

cuba history .org - Cuba Independence War

A HISTORY OF EXTREMES

For over five centuries Cuba’s history of extremes has been created by its geographical position. Very shortly after the Spanish ramped across the island in the early sixteenth century murdering Indians, founding settlements and writing disgusted notes in their diaries about the lack of gold, the island became the operational hub for the fleet system. Hundreds of galleons lumbered annually across the Atlantic from Seville carrying supplies for the settlers (but never enough, according to the despairing wails one can still read in the archives of the Havana Town Council) and returned laden to the gunwales with American loot.

Cuba was ideally placed at the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico for the sixteenth and seventeenth century fleets to take advantage of the prevailing wind and the deep Bahama channel for their return to Europe. The long-suffering Spanish settlers were however trapped between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. The former were rival European powers and their bands of licensed privateers and the vastness of the latter was a remarkable frightening prospect for the few that had been put to guard so much, for by the end of the sixteenth century incalculable riches were pouring annually into the port of Havana. The inhabitants of the early settlement had permanently sore eyes from squinting at the horizon on the lookout for enemy sails and twitchy sword hands from nervous nights wondering if the rustlings in the woods were the local fauna or approaching bands of bloodthirsty buccaneers.