Bits of Cuban History

President of Cuba, 1940-44 and 1952-58 and Cuban strong man from the Sergeants’ revolt of 1933 to the Revolution of 1959. Born in Banes, Oriente province, January 16, the son of a sugar cutter, he spent his early years in poverty and attended a Quaker missionary school. After leaving school he worked as a tailor’s apprentice, cane-field […]

A mosquito-borne disease with high mortality whose urban form probably crossed the Atlantic through the African slave trade, yellow fever was known in Havana by 1720, possibly by l647. The native Cuban population soon acquired a degree of immunity and serious outbreaks were mostly associated with a big influx of immigrants or visitors. The 6,008

United States career diplomat with wide Latin American experience, appointed assistant secretary of state by the Franklin Roosevelt administration in early 1933. Roosevelt and his Secretary of state Cordell Hull decided to send Sumner Wells to Cuba as US ambassador to mediate between President Gerardo Machado and the opposition.  Appointed April 24, 1933, Welles arrived

Novelist and journalist from Pinar del Rio province, he was a teacher when he developed an interest in literature, publishing in 1837 his short stories “La Peña blanca,” “El Ave muerta,” “La Cueva de Taganana.”  These brief narrations show great power of description and the capacity to transmit the cultural atmosphere of the period. In

Gerardo Machado y Morales (1871-1939). President of Cuba, 1925-1933, was born in Santa Clara and spent his childhood in the family cattle estate, attended private schools and in his early 20s engaged in growing and selling tobacco.  His father fought for the rebels in the Ten Years’ War, becoming a major, and Gerardo joined them

A December 1955 offshoot of the Federación Estudiantil Universitaria (FEU) at the University of Havana, the Revolutionary Directorate promoted an insurrectionary response to Batista’s repression, and established contact with other opponents of the regime, including Fidel Castro. Its March 1957 attack on the Presidential Palace failed to kill the president, but cost the life of its leader

Organized by José Martí (who was killed almost immediately), the war began with the Grito de Baire, February 24, 1895, accompanied by risings in various places in Matanzas and Oriente provinces. A prompt response by the governor, accompanied by an amnesty offer, virtually ended the revolt in Matanzas, but the eastern rebels were soon reinforced

In the late 1960s and early 1970s these “we shall win” brigades consisted of some thousand youths, mainly American, who visited Cuba to help with the sugar harvest, motivated by Cuban hostility to United States and support for North Vietnam. They received liberal doses of indoctrination against the war and in the Cuban government’s revolutionary

Following Cuban confiscation of American petroleum refineries for refusing to process Soviet crude, the United States forbade all exports to Cuba with a temporary exception of certain foods and medicine on June 29, 1960. Restrictions on travel to Cuba by US citizens and residents followed on January 16, 1961, and the abolition of the Cuban

An attempted army pronunciamiento (coup) of July 14, 1936, was frustrated when Spain’s left-wing republican government issued arms to the general population. The result was a three-year war in which the nationalist insurgents owed their eventual victory to direct intervention by Italy, logistical support by Germany, and a British blockade. The republican cause was clamorously