Ciboney

The Ciboney, also spelled Siboney, were an Indigenous people of Cuba, the Tiburon Peninsula of Haiti and possibly Jamaica. At the time of the Spanish conquest they were the most numerous people of Cuba, living across the centre of the island. Scholars still debate how they should be classified, and for much of the twentieth century their name was wrongly applied to quite different, much older peoples.

When the Spanish arrived, the Ciboney occupied the long middle stretch of Cuba, between the far west of the island, in today's Pinar del Río Province, and the eastern region of Oriente. The friar Bartolomé de las Casas, who lived among them in the early sixteenth century, wrote that their speech and customs resembled those of the Lucayans of the Bahamas. He also observed that, unlike the peoples of Hispaniola to the east, they had no large chiefdoms or wider political organisation binding their communities together.

The scholars Julian Granberry and Gary Vescelius group the Ciboney with the Lucayans and the peoples of western Hispaniola, and possibly Jamaica, as Western Taíno. On this view they spoke a form of Taíno, conventionally called Ciboney Taíno, which differed from the Classic Taíno of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico but could be understood by its speakers. Other scholars disagree. The archaeologist L. Antonio Curet questions the use of the label Taíno at all, noting that critics since the nineteenth century have preferred names closer to those the islanders themselves used, such as siboneyes for the people of Cuba. Cayetano Coll y Toste, a Puerto Rican historian, likewise did not call the Ciboney Taíno.

According to Granberry and Vescelius, the Ciboney were the dominant population of Cuba until around 1450. From the middle of the fifteenth century, Classic Taíno groups from Hispaniola began to settle in eastern Cuba, where they set up chiefdoms concentrated in Oriente, with settlements reaching as far west as the Havana area. Much of the Ciboney country then came under the control of these eastern chiefs, although no single political authority ever ruled the whole island. Migration from Hispaniola grew after the Spanish arrived there, as Taíno refugees fled the invaders. Among them was the chief Hatuey, who crossed to Cuba with many of his people and resisted the Spanish there until he was captured and executed.

Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar began the Spanish conquest of Cuba in 1511, bringing the island into the Spanish Empire. The Indigenous population of every group on the island then fell steeply, and by the end of the sixteenth century the Ciboney and their neighbours no longer existed as distinct peoples. The town of Siboney in eastern Cuba preserves the name.

Las Casas distinguished the Ciboney clearly from the Guanahatabey, a hunting and gathering people of western Cuba with a separate language. In the twentieth century, however, archaeologists misread the sources and used "Ciboney" for the aceramic sites, those without pottery, found on several Caribbean islands. Because many of these lay in former Guanahatabey territory, the name became attached to that non-Taíno people and to early Archaic cultures more generally, including the stone-age settlers of Antigua and Barbuda, where the Ciboney never lived. Scholars recognised the error in the 1980s, and the name is now used again for the Western Taíno people of central Cuba.

Our 800 and 900 maps label a territory across Cuba and western Hispaniola as Ciboney, following the older, now abandoned use of the name for the Archaic peoples of the region; the Ciboney known from Spanish sources lived in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The 1000 map shows the area as Taíno.