Conclusion

As stated in the introduction, this book’s chapters stand both as individual essays and as coordinated parts. While each of the chapters offers its own topic-specific interpretations and conclusions, when the chapters are read together, they provide answers to several overarching questions. They emphasize the relationship between geographical space and human actions, they put Cuba in its broader Caribbean and Atlantic contexts, they examine complex interactions among diverse racial and ethnic groups, they trace the development of distinctive economic systems and social structures, and they discuss the genesis of a variegated Cuban identity and culture(s) that are the result of transculturation among three primary cultural roots, themselves the product of centuries of transculturation in the Amerindian Caribbean, Iberia, and western Africa. The book thus is built on the premise that understanding Cuba’s complex early history requires consideration of many interrelated aspects—a “total history” approach, to use the terminology of the Annales school—that connects the geographical, the economic, the political, the social, and the cultural....

Deceivingly Sweet

This chapter discusses the nature of the sugar plantation as a distinctive socio-economic system characterized by the sugar and slavery binomial. It also discusses slave and free black resistance to that system. The emergence of Cuba’s first sugar plantations, I argue, while transformative, did not turn the island upside down (or right side up), as was the case in islands such as Barbados. That said, Cuba’s early “sugar revolt” had the same kind of injurious repercussions of “sugar revolutions” throughout the region: the expansion of African slavery and manifold destructive, even evil, economic and social ramifications.

The Cockpit of Europe

This chapter focuses on the interconnectivity of war and peace in Europe with a variety of forms of European incursion in the Caribbean during the 1500s and 1600s. It traces the emergence and evolution of piracy and privateering as well as European colonial expansion by settlers and buccaneers. It provides a systematic analysis of how belligerence in the Old World (such as the prolonged Wars of Religion) impacted Cuba and the rest of the region. It also explores Spain’s efforts to protect its colonies through fortifications, fleet systems of navigation, and increased military presence.

Geography and the Shaping of Early Colonial Cuba

This chapter offers a synthetic view of Cuba’s geography, including aspects such as location, insularity, topography, hydrography, climate, soils, sea and wind currents, natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes, and natural resources. It also offers an overview of the Cuban archipelago’s geological evolution over millions of years. While this chapter does not subscribe to geographic determinism, it explores the ways in which Cuba’s geographic features have shaped its historical trajectory and the culture of its people. Geographical factors such as sea currents made Cuba a strategic location for a trade and military post, and its climatological, topographic, hydrographic, and soil conditions made the island an ideal location for sugar production.

The Cuban Ajiaco

This chapter explores the complex manifold hybrid cultural manifestations stemming from the human interactions discussed in the previous chapter. The chapter recurs to Fernando Ortiz’s ajiaco (Cuban stew) metaphor as representative of the syncretic or hybrid culture forged by transculturation among Amerindians, Europeans, and Africans. The chapter brings to life the stories of different characters that are emblematic of creolization and transculturation in religion and burial practices, food and diet, and music.

The Manufacturing of Cuba

This chapter examines various topics of the early conquest and colonization of Cuba. It discusses the Reconquista--the prolonged war between Catholic and Muslim Iberia-- as the cultural and institutional background of the conquest. That war generated social and political institutions (such as the encomienda) as well as cultural practices that conquistadors like Diego Velázquez transplanted to the New World. It discusses the monarchical model that developed during the Reconquista, the rise of the Hapsburgs, and a host of colonial and Catholic Church institutions established in Hispaniola, Cuba, and other colonies. It also discusses Spanish attitudes toward Muslims and Jews. A major theme is the population collapse of the region’s indigenous inhabitants, the atrocities of the conquest (such as the martyrdom of Hatuey), and the protestations of Bartolomé de las Casas.

First Encounters, Inventing America, and the Columbian Exchange

This chapter covers the subject of the discovery of America, including the voyages of Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci. It looks at the theological, scientific, and philosophical debates surrounding the early encounters between Europeans and the indigenous inhabitants, as well as the evolving cartography of the New World. The chapter also examines two useful perspectives: Edmundo O’Gorman’s “Invention of America,” and Alfred W. Crosby’s “Columbian Exchange.”

Indigenous Inhabitants

This chapter offers a dynamic overview of pre-Columbian Cuba that reflects the most recent scholarship and archaeological research. It discusses different theories about the island’s initial peopling, subsequent migrations, and interactions among indigenous inhabitants of Cuba and other parts of the circum-Caribbean. It seeks to facilitate an understanding of the many overlapping (often bewildering) categorizations and terminologies that have been used to classify different indigenous groups, including Palaeolithic and Neolithic levels of development; and Casimiroid, Ostionoid and related classifications. It concludes with an overview of pre-Columbian Tainos’ society, religion, and agriculture.

Introduction

Cuba has attracted disproportionate attention from historians and other scholars. This is particularly true for the nineteenth century, when, as a slave society, Cuba was the world’s largest exporter of sugar, and for the post-1959 period, when it became the hemisphere’s first socialist nation, unpredictably remaining so past the collapse of the communist world in 1989–1991. I myself have dedicated most of my scholarly career to the study of those two periods....

The Emergence of Creole Society

This chapter looks at the complex emerging colonial society that combined a remnant of indigenous inhabitants, white settlers, African slaves, and free men and women of different races. It also discusses asymmetrical human interactions among the races—whites, blacks and mulattos, and Amerindians and mestizos—and pays much attention to conflicting and overlapping hierarchies and social structures that developed on the island, as well as to the ways in which particular groups and individuals challenged those structures and hierarchies. Lastly, in this chapter I expand on the thesis of the “Two Cubas”: one, an urban, official, and mercantilist Havana, the region’s navigation hub; the other, the Cuba of the east, peasant, remote, relaxed, and rebellious, where smuggling and tobacco-farming predominated.