Who ruled Havana?

Havana lies on the north-west coast of Cuba around a large, deep bay entered through a narrow channel, one of the finest natural harbours in the Caribbean. It faces the Florida Straits and the Gulf Stream, the route that Spanish ships followed home to Europe. That harbour made Havana the key to Spain's American empire for nearly four centuries, and in the 20th century the city became the capital of an independent Cuba and the centre of its revolution.

Before the Spanish arrived, the west of Cuba was home to Taíno and older Guanahatabey communities. Spanish settlers founded San Cristóbal de la Habana in 1514 or 1515 on the island's south coast, but the site proved unhealthy, and after a move to the north coast the town settled beside its present bay in 1519. It was small and exposed at first: in 1555 the French corsair Jacques de Sores captured and burned it.

From the 1560s Havana became the assembly point for the treasure fleets of the Spanish Empire. Ships from Mexico, Panama and South America gathered in the harbour each year before sailing for Spain under escort, and the town grew rich on supplying, repairing and building ships. To protect this traffic Spain built some of the strongest fortifications in the Americas, including the Castillo de la Real Fuerza and the Morro castle at the harbour mouth, and later a ring of city walls. Havana became the capital of Cuba in 1607.

In 1762, during the Seven Years' War, a British expedition besieged and captured the city after taking the Morro. Britain returned Havana the following year in exchange for Florida, and Spain rebuilt its defences on an even larger scale, adding the fortress of La Cabaña. During the late 18th and 19th centuries sugar plantations worked by enslaved Africans made Cuba Spain's richest colony, and the Atlantic slave trade to the island continued long after most other countries had banned it. Havana outgrew its walls, which were mostly demolished from 1863.

Cubans fought for independence in the Ten Years' War of 1868 to 1878 and again from 1895. On 15 February 1898 the American battleship Maine exploded in Havana harbour, and the explosion helped bring the United States into the war with Spain that year. American forces occupied Cuba until the Republic of Cuba was inaugurated in Havana on 20 May 1902. Over the next half century the capital grew prosperous and heavily tied to American money, with grand hotels, casinos and a large tourist trade, alongside deep poverty and political violence.

The dictator Fulgencio Batista fled on 1 January 1959, and Fidel Castro's rebel army entered Havana in triumph days later. The revolutionary government nationalised property, broke with the United States and aligned Cuba with the Soviet Union, and the city was at the centre of world attention during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Little new building took place for decades, which preserved the colonial core but left many buildings in decay.

The collapse of Soviet aid in the early 1990s brought severe shortages, and tourism was revived to earn hard currency. Old Havana and its fortifications were listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1982. Havana today has about two million people and remains the capital and largest city of Cuba.