Arms of the Republic (Escudo de la Palma Real)

Charles V granted a rather baroque coat of arms to the new colony early in his reign. Cuba’s present arms date from the Ten Years’ War and they first occur on the insurgents’ $500 bonds of 1869. A lictor’s bundle of an axe and twelve rods (the Roman symbol of union and authority), crowned with a red Phrygian bonnet (the cap of liberty), bearing a white star, supports an ogival (pointed) shield, wreathed with oak on the dexter side (the observer’s left) and laurel on the sinister side (the observer’s right). The upper half of the shield bears the “key to the Gulf” on a sea between two mountains (Yucatán and Florida) with the sun rising on the horizon. The lower half of the shield bears in the sinister quarter a royal palm (Cuba’s national tree), and in the dexter quarter, diagonally, the three blue and two white stripes of the national flag. Unlike other Marxist regimes, the Castro regime has made no change to these 120-year-old arms, so as to emphasize its pretension of continuity between the Revolution of 1959 and those of Céspedes and Martí.