Fotos

The recorded history of Cuba began on 28 October 1492, when Christopher Columbus sighted the island during his first voyage of discovery and claimed it for Spain.[5] (This is still not certain and is an unresolved topic.[6])The island had been inhabited by Amerindian peoples known as the Taíno and Ciboney whose ancestors had come from South America several centuries before. The Taíno were farmers and the Ciboney (also written Siboney neo-Taino nations) were both farmers and hunter-gatherers; some have suggested that copper trade was significant and mainland artifacts [7] have been found in proximal Taino cultures.

The coast of Cuba was fully mapped by Sebastián de Ocampo in 1511, and in that year the first Spanish settlement was founded by Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar at Baracoa. Other towns, including Havana (founded in 1515), soon followed. The Spanish, as they did throughout the Americas, oppressed and enslaved the approximately 100,000 indigenous people that resisted conversion to Christianity on the island. Within a century they had all but disappeared as a distinct nation as a result of the combined effects of European introduced disease, forced labor and genocide, though aspects of the region's aboriginal heritage has survived in part via the rise of a significant Mestizo population.[8][9] With destruction of aboriginal society, the settlers began to exploit abducted African slaves, with more resistance to the diseases from the old world, and who soon made up a significant proportion of the inhabitants.