The Cuba Libre Story

Cuba has always been fighting for its freedom.

100,000 died, and even though we lost the war, the country had changed.

There is little question that Meyer Lansky had thoroughly corrupted Batista.

It's not a lie, they didn't promise anything.

They promised a revolution, they did a revolution.

These guys were bound to become either martyrs, or national heroes.

Una revolución!

- Fidel Castro! -

He told Khrushchev, "You should unleash the entire Soviet nuclear arsenals."

Apocalypse.

Cuba will never bend its knee.

Today's Cuba is a curious mix of tropical paradise and quaint nostalgia.

The island is renowned for its cigars, its rum and its colonial beauty.

But to understand Cuba today, you have to understand its tumultuous past.

Because for centuries, Cuba has been a hotbed for upheaval.

How did Cuba become the hub of the slave-trade?

Why, of all places, did the Spanish colonial empire collapse here?

And why does the United States possess a military base in Cuba, at Guantanamo?

Cuba bears the scars of 500 years of foreign occupation.

But that does not mean that its people have ever given up their dream of freedom.

Cuba is a country, which has always been coveted by the world powers.

By the Spanish empire, by England, and by France.

It was conquered, of course, by Spain.

Cuba played a decisive role in the discovery of the Americas.

But I'm very happy that this phrase is not used very often anymore,

because we were here before it was "discovered".

Cuba is the biggest island in the Caribbean.

It spans 760 miles from east to west.

That's roughly the distance from Washington, DC, to Miami.

Cuba's climate is hot and tropical.

The land is fertile and the ocean surrounding it is rich in fish.

For centuries, this has made Cuba a choice destination for immigrants and invaders.

The first traces of human life in Cuba are more than 4,000 years old,

predating the pyramids of Egypt.

Cuba's native inhabitants lived in palm tree huts, or caves.

They subsisted on sweet potatoes, yucca, peanuts, as well as fish and game.

They were also the first people to farm and smoke tobacco.

On October 28th, 1492, three caravels appeared on Cuba's horizon.

The men who disembarked were unfamiliar to the islanders.

They were white. They carried swords and helmets made of steel.

They were Spaniards, and their leader was called Christopher Columbus.

It was through Columbus, in 1492,

that the Spaniards discovered these islands.

Back then, they could not know

that it would one day be something as grand as today's America.

Columbus returned to Barcelona,

to his patrons, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand.

They had financed his voyage,

but he brought back neither gold nor silver,

only some indigenous Cubans, whom he called Indians.

In his diary, he wrote that they would make good slaves.

But the Spanish regents declared that there was to be no slavery

in the New World, before sending Columbus back to conquer Cuba

and the surrounding islands. Their orders were promptly ignored.

What probably happened is that the men

were either enslaved, killed outright, or worked to death as porters.

Children were brought up more or less as Spanish.

Women "joined" the families of Spanish conquistadors.

At first, many natives welcomed the Spaniards with open arms.

Once hostilities began, they did not stand a chance against the conquistadors.

They met with little resistance,

because the natives were completely outmatched, militarily,

and were then basically eradicated by the diseases

the Spaniards brought with them, such as measles and smallpox.

Spanish swords and European diseases killed 90 percent of Cuba's inhabitants

within a few short years.

But the exchange of diseases went both ways.

For Columbus's conquistadores also brought something back.

Syphilis.

Nevertheless, Spain's triumph in the New World was unparalleled in history.

In the name of the cross,

the conquistadors spread death and slavery.

Due to its strategic position, Cuba played a decisive role.

Havana was the key to the Caribbean.

Through its port came all the riches of the New World.

Gold, silver, wood, and spices.

Cuba was a cornerstone of the Spanish Empire,

when it comes to Latin America.

From the early colonial days,

Havana was the main commercial hub for colonial goods and treasures.

It was the place where, once or twice a year,

the ships of the Spanish treasure fleet gathered

for the so-called Carrera de Indias, and crossed the Atlantic.

It took Spain barely 50 years to conquer the New World.

They destroyed the mighty Inca and Aztec Empires.

The treasures of the New World were loaded onto Spanish galleons.

En route to Spain, they gathered in Havana,

and added one of the island's precious plants to their cargo. Tobacco.

Throughout the 16th century, tobacco was Cuba's principal export.

The natives of Cuba were the first to grow and smoke it.

Spanish sailors and merchants took it around the globe.

Because of them, Cuba became known as a tobacco island.

Tobacco is a very demanding plant, which needs a lot of care.

The tobacco leaves must be watched carefully

because they can only be cut at the right moment.

There were always slaves in tobacco,

but also a lot of independent farmers and smallholders.

A hundred years after Columbus's landing,

the natives of the Caribbean had been all but exterminated.

To continue the exploitation of their new domains,

Spain had to import a new workforce.

Unscrupulous traders found the solution in Africa's slave markets.

12.5 million Africans were crammed into slave ships and taken to the New World.

1.5 million of them died during the journey.

Slavery came to Cuba as it did to all of the Americas.

About two million of them were brought to Cuba.

They were like merchandise.

It was a big, sinister business.

Slavery came to Cuba very early when the Spanish took over,

but it didn't develop as a major institution

until after 1804, 1805,

when Haiti, the sugar mills in Haiti, were destroyed.

Haiti is part of Cuba's neighboring island, and a French colony since 1660.

While Cuba relied on tobacco farming, Haiti's staple crop was sugar cane.

With sufficient manpower, it was a lucrative business.

In 1789, 32,000 white settlers lived in Haiti,

as did 432,000 African slaves.

On August 17th, 1791, Haiti's slaves rose up in revolt.

They killed their masters and fought a bloody war to gain their freedom.

Haiti's sugar industry was wiped out.

The consequence is that the world's main sugar producer

disappears for a few years.

The Cubans see an opportunity.

They want to take over the French colony's business.

It's important to note

that many people migrated from French Haiti to Cuba.

They brought both a lot of money,

but also considerable know-how with them.

The Cubans welcomed the refugee plantation owners from Haiti with open arms.

With their help, Cuba aimed to become the Caribbean's new sugar capital.

But this required more and more slaves from Africa.

The Haitian revolution, however, had undermined the entire practice of slavery.

There were increasing calls for the liberation of slaves.

On August first, 1834, the British declared that all slaves

throughout their Empire were now free.

But Spain and Cuba refused to follow suit.

Their sugar business depended on slave labor.

By the middle of the century, 1850, 1860,

Spain had developed the sugar industry in Cuba, was the major exporter of sugar.

Sugar, for the Cubans at least,

meant the need to resort to slave labor.

Slaves were brought to Cuba without much interruption until the 1860s.

Slavery was a defining part of Cuban history for several centuries.

Several times historical censuses show that African slaves

outnumbered Spanish settlers,

but never by the margins that had made Haiti's revolution possible.

Even today, an estimated 60 percent of Cubans

are at least in part descendants of slaves.

Without the blacks, Cuba wouldn't be Cuba.

Without the Afro-Cubans, we wouldn't have the literature,

the music and the dances that we have today.

Cuba as we know it would never have existed.

Nevertheless, that is not their major legacy.

The major legacy of the African slaves brought to Cuba

is their sweat and their blood, which built the Cuban nation.

Cuba's sugar plantations were expanding,

despite ever-increasing taxes and customs duties imposed by Spain.

The white settlers in Havana grew rich. The countryside was racked by poverty.

Cuba's biggest sugar customer was its northern neighbor,

the United States of America.

Spain upheld slavery on Cuba.

This is the only reason that it could maintain its colonial rule for so long.

The Cubans knew perfectly well that without Spain's protection,

the British would have put an end to the whole system.

For 300 years, Spain ruled over vast territories in the Americas.

It was only in the early 19th century

that colony after colony began to rebel against Spain.

It was the beginning of the end for the Spanish Empire.

Cuba remained faithful, because of slavery.

It alone guaranteed the huge sugar profits.

It was like a trump card in Madrid's hand.

The Spanish always emphasized that they were maintaining order,

and that thus Cuba's economy could flourish.

The Cubans paid a heavy price for this.

Spain considered Cuba as a zone for exploitation.

They wanted to strengthen their own economy,

which was lagging behind the rest of Europe.

They massively exploited Cuba.

Much like Cuba, the Southern States of the US depended on slavery.

Many Cubans, and many Southerners, wanted Cuba to join the Union.

This would both protect slavery in Cuba,

and introduce another slave state to the US, and hand them a majority in Congress.

But in 1860, Abraham Lincoln, an opponent of slavery,

was elected president of the United States.

The Southern States promptly seceded from the Union.

President Lincoln mobilized the army.

Thus began a long and bloody struggle.

Early on in the war, Lincoln emancipated all slaves in the United States.

After four years, the North prevailed over the South, and slavery was abolished.

The Civil War in the United States created a nation that didn't have slavery,

or slavery was ended, so many Cubans saw the possibility of annexing

to the United States as not a good possibility,

and then they began to think about, well,

we have to either reform the relationship with Spain or break completely with Spain.

Already in the 19th century,

Cuba was divided into an eastern and a western half.

The capital, Havana, was in the western part of the island.

Here lived merchants of Spanish origin and the island's leading civil servants,

people who benefitted from the sugar trade.

We have two completely distinct histories on Cuba.