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Within two years of entering Cuba, the Cuba Company built a 350-mile railroad connecting the eastern port of Santiago to the existing railways in central Cuba. The company was the largest single foreign investment in Cuba for the first two decades of the twentieth century. By the 1910s it was the largest company in the country. [91]
The first people known to have inhabited Cuba was the Siboney, an Amerindian people. They were followed by another Amerindian people, the Taíno who were the main population both of Cuba and other islands in The Antilles when Christopher Columbus first sighted the island in 1492.
Between 1780 and 1867, over 780 000 slaves were brought to Cuba. This was more than all the rest of Spanish America combined. [7] Slavery was leaned upon heavily by the owners of the highly profitable sugar plantations. By 1886, people of colour – the majority being ex-slaves – made up 1/3 of the population of Cuba. [8]
The earliest evidence of the Taíno people on Cuba dates to the 9th century AD. [35] Descendants of the first settlers of Cuba persisted on the western part of the island until Columbian contact, where they were recorded as the Guanahatabey people, who lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. [36] [33]
The yacht Granma sets out from Mexico to Cuba with 82 men on board, including Raúl Castro, Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos. 2 December: The Granma lands in Oriente Province. 1957: 17 January: Castro's guerrillas score their first success by sacking an army outpost on the south coast, and start gaining followers in both Cuba and abroad. 13 March
Reconstruction of a Taíno village in El Chorro de Maíta, Cuba. Scholars have faced difficulties researching the native inhabitants of the Caribbean islands to which Columbus voyaged in 1492, since European accounts cannot be read as objective evidence of a native Caribbean social reality. [16]
Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, the first governor of Cuba. In 1511, Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar set out with three ships and an army of 300 men from Hispaniola to form the first Spanish settlement in Cuba, with orders from Spain to conquer the island. The settlement was at Baracoa, but the new settlers were to be greeted with stiff resistance ...
At the time of first contact between Europe and the Americas, the Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean included the Taíno of the northern Lesser Antilles, most of the Greater Antilles and the Bahamas, the Kalinago of the Lesser Antilles, the Ciguayo and Macorix of parts of Hispaniola, and the Guanahatabey of western Cuba.