The history of Cuba

Cuba, the largest island of the Caribbean, was home to Taíno farmers and older hunting and fishing peoples when Columbus reached it in 1492. Spanish conquest destroyed most of its Indigenous population within a few decades, and Havana became the fortified port through which the treasure fleets of the Spanish Empire passed. In the nineteenth century Cuba grew into the world's greatest sugar producer on the labour of hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans, and fought three wars for independence before Spanish rule ended in 1898 with the intervention of the United States. The republic that followed lived under heavy American influence until Fidel Castro's revolution of 1959 created a one-party socialist state allied to the Soviet Union, which has survived the Cold War, the loss of its Soviet patron and more than six decades of US sanctions.

People reached Cuba at least 6,000 years ago, probably by canoe from Central America or northern South America, and lived by fishing, gathering shellfish and hunting. Their descendants, known to the Spanish as Guanahatabey and often grouped with other early peoples as Ciboney, were still living in the far west of the island in 1492. From around the eighth century CE successive waves of Arawak-speaking farmers moved up the chain of islands from the Orinoco region, and by the time of the Spanish conquest their descendants, the Taíno, occupied most of the island.

The Taíno lived in villages of thatched houses under hereditary chiefs called caciques. They grew cassava, from whose roots they baked flat bread, along with maize, sweet potatoes, cotton and tobacco, which they smoked in rolled leaves and through a forked tube. They played a ritual ball game in stone-lined courts and honoured spirits called zemis, carved in wood, stone and shell. Estimates of their numbers on the eve of conquest vary widely; the friar Bartolomé de las Casas thought there were several hundred thousand, while many modern historians suggest a figure between about 100,000 and 350,000.

Christopher Columbus reached the north-east coast of Cuba on 28 October 1492, believing it might be part of Asia. The conquest began in 1511, when Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar crossed from Hispaniola, today shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, with a few hundred men and founded Baracoa. The cacique Hatuey, who had fled Hispaniola to warn the Cuban Taíno, led a guerrilla resistance until he was captured and burned alive in 1512. Under the encomienda system, Indigenous people were assigned to Spanish settlers as forced labourers in gold washing and farming. Massacres, overwork, hunger and above all epidemics of European diseases, smallpox foremost among them, reduced the Taíno to a few thousand within a generation, although their descendants survived in eastern Cuba and through intermarriage.

Velázquez founded seven towns, including Santiago de Cuba and Havana, which moved to its present site on the north coast in 1519. In the same year Hernán Cortés sailed from Cuba to conquer the Aztec Empire, and as the riches of New Spain and Peru drew settlers away, Cuba's own economy shrank to cattle ranching and supplying ships. Its importance for the Spanish Empire lay in Havana, where from the 1560s the silver fleets from Veracruz and Portobelo gathered each year before crossing the Atlantic together. Raids by French corsairs, which burned Havana in 1555, and later by English and Dutch privateers led Spain to fortify the harbour with the castles of El Morro and La Punta. Tobacco, grown by small farmers, became the island's main export in the seventeenth century, under a royal monopoly from 1717.

The turning point came during the Seven Years' War, when a British expedition besieged and captured Havana in August 1762. During eleven months of occupation the British opened the port to free trade and sold thousands of enslaved Africans. At the Peace of Paris in 1763 Spain recovered Havana in exchange for Florida, but it had learned the lesson and loosened its trade restrictions. When the slave uprising of the Haitian Revolution destroyed the sugar industry of Saint-Domingue after 1791, French planters and capital moved to Cuba, and the island rapidly took its place.

Over the following decades Cuba became the largest sugar producer in the world, using steam-powered mills and, from 1837, the first railway in Latin America. The boom was built on the Atlantic slave trade. Hundreds of thousands of Africans were shipped to Cuba, most of them after Spain had agreed under British pressure in 1817 to end the trade from 1820, so that the bulk of them arrived illegally; the traffic continued until the 1860s. By 1841 enslaved people made up more than 40 percent of the population. Conditions on the sugar estates were brutal, and resistance was frequent, from runaway communities in the mountains to conspiracies such as that of the free Black carpenter José Antonio Aponte in 1812. In 1844 the colonial authorities used an alleged plot, the Conspiracy of La Escalera, to torture and execute or expel thousands of free people of colour and slaves. From the 1840s planters also brought more than 120,000 indentured Chinese labourers, many of whom worked in conditions little different from slavery.

Cuba remained loyal to Spain when the Spanish American wars of independence freed most of the mainland in the 1810s and 1820s, largely because Creole planters feared that rebellion would unleash a slave revolt like Haiti's. Some looked instead to annexation by the United States, whose southern states wanted another slave territory; American governments offered to buy the island several times, and the Venezuelan-born adventurer Narciso López led filibuster expeditions from American soil until he was captured and garrotted in 1851.

On 10 October 1868 the planter Carlos Manuel de Céspedes freed his slaves at his estate of La Demajagua and declared independence, beginning the Ten Years' War. Fought mainly in the east, it cost perhaps 200,000 lives on both sides and ended with the Pact of Zanjón in 1878, which promised reforms that were largely not delivered. The mixed-race general Antonio Maceo refused to accept it and fought on briefly. Slavery was abolished in stages and ended entirely in 1886.

The final war was organised from exile in New York by the poet and journalist José Martí, founder of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, who warned of the danger of US domination as well as Spanish rule. It began in February 1895. Martí landed in April and was killed in a skirmish at Dos Ríos on 19 May, but Maceo and the Dominican-born commander Máximo Gómez carried the war the whole length of the island, burning cane fields to destroy the colonial economy. Maceo was killed in December 1896. To deprive the rebels of support, the Spanish commander Valeriano Weyler ordered the rural population into fortified towns in his reconcentration policy; disease and hunger in the camps killed civilians on a vast scale, with estimates commonly ranging from about 150,000 to more than 300,000 deaths.

American sympathy for the rebels, fed by sensational newspaper reporting, turned into war after the battleship USS Maine exploded in Havana harbour on 15 February 1898, killing 266 men. The cause was never established, but the United States declared war on Spain in April. American forces, including Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, landed near Santiago, and the destruction of the Spanish fleet there in July ended the war in Cuba within weeks. The Cuban liberation army, which had done most of the fighting over three years, was excluded from the surrender and the peace negotiations. By the Treaty of Paris Spain gave up Cuba, which was placed under US military occupation, while Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines passed to the United States.

The United States withdrew in 1902 only after Cuba wrote into its constitution the Platt Amendment, which gave Washington the right to intervene to preserve order and independence and to lease naval bases, among them Guantánamo Bay, which the US still holds. American troops returned from 1906 to 1909 and intervened again in 1912 and 1917. In 1912 the government crushed the Independent Party of Colour, formed by Afro-Cuban veterans, killing thousands of Black Cubans. American companies came to own much of the sugar industry, railways and utilities, and the economy rose and fell with the world sugar price.

Gerardo Machado, elected in 1924, extended his rule by force and was brought down in 1933 by a general strike and a revolt of army sergeants led by Fulgencio Batista. A short-lived revolutionary government under Ramón Grau San Martín abolished the Platt Amendment unilaterally, gave women the vote and decreed the eight-hour day, but was overthrown in January 1934 with American approval. Batista dominated politics from behind the scenes, was elected president in 1940 under a progressive new constitution, and handed over power in 1944. The governments of Grau and Carlos Prío that followed were marked by corruption and gang violence. On 10 March 1952, shortly before elections he was likely to lose, Batista seized power in a coup and suspended the constitution. Havana in the 1950s was prosperous by Latin American standards and famous for its casinos, many run by American organised crime, but rural poverty, unemployment and inequality were deep, and the regime's police used torture and murder against opponents.

On 26 July 1953 a young lawyer, Fidel Castro, led an attack on the Moncada barracks in Santiago. It failed, many of the attackers were killed after capture, and Castro was imprisoned, but at his trial he made a famous defence speech ending with the words "history will absolve me". Amnestied in 1955, he went to Mexico, where with his brother Raúl and the Argentine doctor Che Guevara he formed the 26th of July Movement. In December 1956 they landed from the overcrowded yacht Granma in eastern Cuba; most of the 82 men were killed or captured, and the survivors took to the Sierra Maestra. Over two years the guerrillas, supported by an urban underground, wore down an army that lost the will to fight. The United States suspended arms sales to Batista in 1958. After Guevara's column took Santa Clara, Batista fled on 1 January 1959.

The new government at first included liberal moderates, but power lay with Castro. Hundreds of Batista's officials and police were executed after summary revolutionary trials. An agrarian reform in 1959 broke up large estates, many American-owned, and rents were cut sharply. When the United States reduced its sugar quota in 1960, Cuba nationalised American businesses, and Washington responded with a trade embargo that became total in 1962 and has remained in force since. The revolution suppressed the independent press, unions and parties, and hundreds of thousands of Cubans, at first mostly from the middle and upper classes, left for Florida. A national literacy campaign in 1961 taught hundreds of thousands of adults to read, and free education and health care were extended across the country.

In April 1961 about 1,400 Cuban exiles trained and armed by the CIA landed at the Bay of Pigs and were defeated within three days; on the eve of the invasion Castro declared the revolution socialist, and later that year he proclaimed himself a Marxist-Leninist. Fearing another invasion, Cuba accepted Soviet nuclear missiles, and their discovery by US reconnaissance in October 1962 led to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the most dangerous confrontation of the Cold War. John F. Kennedy imposed a naval quarantine, and after thirteen days the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles in return for a US pledge not to invade Cuba and the secret withdrawal of American missiles from Turkey. US attempts to assassinate him and sabotage the economy continued through the 1960s.

Cuba became dependent on the Soviet Union, which bought its sugar at subsidised prices and supplied oil, machinery and arms. Guevara left to spread revolution abroad and was captured and executed in Bolivia in 1967. A 1976 constitution formalised rule by the Communist Party. Under Castro, Cuba pursued an ambitious foreign policy, supporting guerrilla movements in Latin America and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and from 1975 sending hundreds of thousands of troops to Angola, where they fought South African forces, and to Ethiopia. In 1980, after thousands of Cubans sought asylum in the Peruvian embassy, the government let anyone leave through the port of Mariel, and about 125,000 people sailed for Florida in six months.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 removed most of Cuba's trade and subsidies. In the Special Period that followed, the economy shrank by around a third, food and fuel ran short, blackouts lasted much of the day, and malnutrition caused an epidemic of nerve disease. The United States tightened the embargo in 1992 and 1996. In August 1994 rare street protests in Havana, the Maleconazo, were followed by a rafter exodus of more than 30,000 people, which ended with a migration agreement under which the US would admit 20,000 Cubans a year. The government survived by opening the island to foreign tourism and investment, allowing the dollar to circulate and permitting limited self-employment. From 1999 the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez supplied cheap oil in exchange for Cuban doctors and advisers. Dissent remained punished: in the Black Spring of 2003, 75 dissidents and independent journalists were jailed.

Fidel Castro fell ill in 2006 and handed power to Raúl Castro, who formally became president in 2008. Raúl expanded private small businesses, allowed Cubans to buy and sell homes and cars, and in 2013 ended the exit permits that had restricted travel abroad. On 17 December 2014 he and US President Barack Obama announced the restoration of diplomatic relations, embassies reopened in 2015, and Obama visited Havana in 2016, though the embargo, which only Congress can lift, remained, and the first Trump administration reversed much of the opening. Fidel Castro died on 25 November 2016. Miguel Díaz-Canel, born after the revolution, succeeded Raúl as president in 2018 and as first secretary of the Communist Party in 2021, and a new constitution in 2019 recognised private property while confirming the leading role of the party.

The pandemic's closure of tourism, renewed US sanctions, the decline of Venezuelan oil and the failures of a 2021 currency reform produced the worst shortages since the 1990s. On 11 July 2021 thousands of Cubans protested in towns across the island, the largest demonstrations since 1959, and hundreds were later sentenced, some to long prison terms. From 2021 an exodus of unprecedented size followed, with hundreds of thousands of Cubans reaching the United States in two years. A failing power grid caused repeated nationwide blackouts from 2024, and Hurricane Melissa struck eastern Cuba in October 2025.

The crisis deepened sharply in 2026. After the United States seized Venezuelan oil cargoes in late 2025 and removed Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela on 3 January 2026, in an operation in which 32 Cuban personnel were killed, Washington threatened tariffs on any country supplying Cuba with oil, and Mexico halted its shipments. The fuel shortage brought blackouts of up to twenty hours a day, a collapse of the national grid in March, the suspension of many international flights and severe shortages in hospitals and food production, which United Nations experts condemned as a violation of international law. The US government said openly that it sought a change of government in Havana; Cuba released more than 2,000 prisoners and said it was ready to talk, while rejecting negotiations over its political system.