Cuba

From the Taino and the fortified key to the Indies to a sugar colony, a contested republic, and a socialist revolution at the edge of the Cold War.

Cuba's history begins with the Taino, the Arawakan people Columbus encountered in October 1492, and continues through nearly four centuries as a Spanish colony in which Havana became the fortified key to the Indies and the island the world's foremost producer of sugar, worked by enslaved Africans. Three wars of independence, from the Ten Years' War of 1868 to Jose Marti's rising of 1895, ended only with U.S. intervention in the Spanish-American War of 1898; the Republic of Cuba was proclaimed on 20 May 1902, its sovereignty constrained by the Platt Amendment. The republic's turbulent decades of Machado and Batista gave way to the revolution of 1959, when Fidel Castro's movement took power and turned the island toward socialism and alliance with the Soviet Union, drawing the U.S. embargo, the Bay of Pigs, and the missile crisis of 1962. After the hardship of the post-Soviet Special Period, a brief thaw with Washington in 2014-15 and the passing of leadership beyond the Castro family carried Cuba into the present.