Cuba

Abstract

Cuba’s past has taken place at the crossroads of Atlantic history. The largest Caribbean island—located at the crux of crucial shipping lanes and trade networks and neighbored by British, French, and later US and Haitian territories—Cuba has been profoundly shaped by both imperial rivalry and the interaction of European, Amerindian, and African societies and cultures on its shores. The site of a landing by Columbus in October of 1492, the island saw violence and disease unleashed on its indigenous Taíno population. Bartolomé de Las Casas took part in Cuba’s wars of “pacification,” an experience reflected in his Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (see Las Casas 1992, cited under Contemporary Accounts: Colonial Period to 1820). The island served as a launching pad for the conquest campaigns in Mexico and as a crucial meeting site for the treasure galleons bringing gold and silver from Mexico and Peru back to Spain. For that reason, in the 16th and 17th centuries, French and Dutch corsairs menaced the island, although the British were the principal threat during the 18th century, when they invaded and occupied both Guantánamo Bay and Havana. Throughout that period, settlements of Europeans and Africans, both free and enslaved, helped to construct a society based on logging, cattle ranching, shipbuilding, sugar, and tobacco, as well as a vibrant service economy in the island’s capital of Havana, moved there from Santiago de Cuba in 1592. In the 1790s, almost a century later than its neighbor Jamaica, the island experienced a dramatic boom in sugar production, bolstered by the disruptions of the Haitian revolution and the arrival of exiles from St. Domingue. Fiscal policies that favored Cuba’s sugar elite, the precarious racial hierarchies of plantation society, and a strong Spanish military presence made Cuba generally a bastion of loyalty during the Spanish–American independence wars, despite the Aponte slave rebellion of 1812 and the conspiracy of La Escalera in 1843–1844. Throughout the 19th century, the island drifted more into a US economic orbit, periodically shadowed by talk of annexation. 1868 marked the beginning of a thirty-year revolutionary process, a struggle against both Spanish colonialism and ultimately slavery that reached an ambiguous culmination in the US invasion and occupation of 1898. Given this long and complicated history, this bibliography ranges from the 15th to the 20th centuries, though its coverage is by necessity not comprehensive, given the tremendous volume of scholarly production for the 19th and early 20th centuries. That said, this bibliography aspires, nonetheless, to provide a helpful introduction to the literature on this island, colony, and nation in Atlantic history.