THE CARIBBEAN CUBA

When Christopher Columbus landed on the island we now know as Cuba in 1492 -- an island just 90 miles from the Southern tip of Florida in what is now the U.S. -- and claimed it for the Spanish he found communities of Taino and Ciboney people living there. Within a hundred years, due to forced labor and rampant disease, few indigenous people would remain. In the following centuries, Spanish plantation owners grew wealthy by exporting sugar, coffee and tobacco, using enslaved Africans to work their farms.

In the 1800s Cuban pro-independence rebels, including exiled dissident José MartíÍ, rose up repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, against the Spanish. In 1890s the U.S. and the Spanish went to war and by 1898 had official control of Cuba. The U.S. soon granted Cuba independence but for the next sixty years the U.S. supported most Cuban leaders, including the increasingly brutal and corrupt Fugencio Batista.

In 1956, Fidel Castro, a young lawyer from Havana, and 81 of his followers, including his brother Raul and a young doctor named Che Guevara, led a revolution that ousted Batista, nationalized public utilities, confiscated a substantial amount of private property and imprisoned dissidents. It also universalized popular education, granted citizens free health care and enforced gender equality.

When Fidel Castro passed away in 2016 many predicted Cuba would swiftly shake the the political, economic and social structures of the Revolution. That has not happened. In fact, just as hardly anyone predicted the decades-long longevity of Castro's revolution, very little in the island nation follows a predictable path.

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