Cuba - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture
168
Cuba - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781857338461 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Kuperard |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2016 |
| Series: | Culture Smart! , #75 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 168 |
| Sales rank: | 987,807 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Cuba
By Mandy Macdonald, Russell Maddicks
Bravo Ltd
Copyright © 2016 KuperardAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-85733-848-5
CHAPTER 1
LAND & PEOPLE
GEOGRAPHICAL SNAPSHOT
Cubans like to say that their long, slim island lies in the turquoise waters of the Caribbean like a sleeping crocodile. Located at the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico, Cuba is about 97 miles (156 km) south of Florida, 130 miles (210 km) east of Mexico, and 87 miles (140 km) north of Jamaica. The largest island of the Greater Antilles, it is actually part of an archipelago that includes the small Isla de la Juventud (Isle of Youth) off the southwest coast, and about 1,600 coastal islets, keys, and coral reefs.
The mainland stretches some 776 miles (1,250 km) from Baracoa and Guantánamo in the south to Havana and Pinar del Río in the north, and is only 119 miles (191 km) at its widest point. Slightly smaller than England, and about the same size as the US state of Virginia, the total surface area of the island is 42,805 sq. miles (110,861 sq. km).
Cuba is largely low-lying, with a fringe of white sandy beaches, leading inland to a flat or gently undulating landscape of tobacco farms, sugar plantations, wetlands, and forested hills. The three main mountain ranges are the eastern Sierra Maestra, which contains Cuba's highest peak, Pico Turquino (6,476 ft/1,974 m), the Sierra del Escambray in central Cuba, and the Cordillera de Guaniguanico in the west. The landscape around the tobacco growing valleys of Viñales is characterized by mogotes, isolated domes and ridges of forested limestone that rear up straight out of the grassy plains. Only a few rivers are navigable. About 4 percent of the main island is wetlands; the most important is the Zapata Swamp, in the southwest, an important nature reserve.
A falling population, reforestation programs, the lack of large-scale industrial farming or timber extraction, and good park management have left Cuba's wilderness areas and reefs in fairly good shape compared to its Caribbean neighbors. About 14 percent of Cuba's landmass is protected in national and local reserves, including fourteen national parks. Six protected areas are designated as UNESCO biosphere reserves, including Cuchillas del Toa near Baracoa in the eastern province of Guantánamo (which includes Cuba's longest river, the Río de Miel), and the 80,060-acre (32,400-hectare) Parque Baconoa, the largest reserve, near Santiago de Cuba. The Humboldt National Park in the Nipe-Sagua-Baracoa Mountains on the north coast of eastern Cuba, has been designated a UNESCO natural heritage site and is considered one of the most biologically diverse tropical island sites on earth.
Cuba has fourteen provinces, including the capital, plus a special municipality, the Isle of Youth. About one-fifth of the population of 11.2 million lives in Havana.
CLIMATE
Cuba has a tropical climate with a dry season from December to April/May and a rainy season from June to November. Temperatures can reach a sweltering 90°F (32°C) in July, August, and September, the hottest months, and dip to a balmy 79°F (26°C) in January, the coolest month. Santiago de Cuba is generally hotter than Havana by a few degrees, and inland daytime temperatures in eastern Cuba, where there is no sea breeze to offer relief from the searing tropical heat, can rise to around 97°F (36°C) in July and August.
February and March are the driest months and October, during the hurricane season, is the wettest month. Average annual rainfall is around 52 inches (1,320 mm), the highest rainfalls occurring in the mountains and the lowest along the coast and on the islands. At any time of year, the weather can switch from glorious sunshine to a torrential downpour and back to sunshine again in an hour or two. As the wet season begins, temperature and humidity rise together, and the beach becomes a place of refuge, with sea temperatures topping 77°F (25°C), alleviated by the breeze.
Hurricane Prone
Hurricanes are most frequent from August to November, during the wet season. Cuba lies along the main hurricane path through the Caribbean and is affected by a major storm every three years or so, with a serious direct hit every eight or nine years. The most devastating hurricanes in recent years were Gustav and Ike, which hit the island just ten days apart in 2008, causing US $9.7bn of damage and leveling 82,000 homes in the province of Pinar del Río. Hurricane Sandy struck eastern Cuba in October 2012, destroying 17,000 homes and damaging 150,000 before going on to hit the Eastern Seaboard of the US.
Few people died in these hurricanes as Cuba has a well- rehearsed civil and military response, including evacuation of threatened communities and storm shelters. Emergency procedures are posted in all hotels and in other public places, and broadcast on radio and TV. All modern housing and hotels are built to withstand hurricanes, and older hotels have been reinforced.
A BRIEF HISTORY
Like many of its neighbors, the history of Cuba is one of hardship and foreign intervention, including the brutal conquest by Spain of the indigenous people that left few survivors, the transhipment of a million African slaves to work on huge and highly profitable sugar cane plantations, and then a long fight for independence from Spanish rule that only ended in 1898 when the US military got involved. Cuba also shook off the yolk of the US-supported dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959, only to shape its own course under the socialist direction of Fidel Castro, who nationalized American companies, leading to a trade embargo by the US that has endured for more than fifty years. Cuba's subsequent decision to accept the protection of the Soviet Union following the botched US attempt to topple the new regime with the Bay of Pigs invasion of April 17, 1961, drew it into a wider Cold War power game that led directly to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and a hardening of US attitudes.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, Cuba was forced to make do on its own in what came to be known as the Special Period. A time of extreme hardship, rationing, and migration, it forced a complete rethink of the Cuban economy and a new focus on tourism and culture to supplement failing sugar profits.
Since Fidel Castro stepped down as president for health reasons in 2008, his younger brother Raúl has introduced limited but important reforms, allowing Cubans to open private businesses like paladares (small restaurants) and casas particulares (guesthouses), and to buy and sell houses. Negotiations with President Barack Obama, brokered by the Catholic Church, have also resulted in the reopening of the US Embassy in Havana and a partial easing of US restrictions on trade and travel, although the embargo will remain in place until the US Congress votes to remove it.
Origins and Conquest
Few modern archaeological studies have been done in Cuba and the origins of human settlement are unclear. The first inhabitants, sometimes referred to as the Guanajatabeyes, are believed to have migrated from the South American mainland and survived from hunting and fishing along the coast of Cuba, possibly arriving as early 2,500 BCE. They were later pushed to the western end of the island by the much later arrival of two Arawak groups, the Siboney and the Taíno, who also came from the area around present-day Venezuela and brought a more sophisticated material culture based on agriculture. These were the people Christopher Columbus met in October 1492 on his first voyage to the Americas.
Columbus waxed lyrical about the lush vegetation and handsome natives, but he found negligible amounts of gold or pearls in Cuba in 1492 or his subsequent trip in 1494, so it was not until 1510, under Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, that the Spanish conquest began in earnest.
Velázquez de Cuéllar arrived on an expedition from Hispaniola, founding the first Spanish settlement in Baracoa and claiming the island for the Spanish Crown and the Roman Catholic faith.
Bartolomé de las Casas, however, the Spanish priest who recorded the eradication of the native peoples with horror in his History of the Indies, described the violent conquest of the Indians as "far ... from the purpose of God and His Church." The conquered Siboney and Taíno were coerced into labor on the lands they had lost, and by 1515 most of the main cities and towns of modern-day Cuba had been founded.
The indigenous cacique (chieftain) Hatuey came from Hispaniola to warn the Taínos of the fate that awaited them at the hands of the Spanish and led a brief insurrection against the conquistadors that ended in 1512 when he was captured and burned at the stake. Asked if he would convert before burning, the proud cacique replied: "If Spaniards go to heaven, I prefer to go to hell." Today, he is considered Cuba's first rebel and included in the pantheon of revolutionary heros. A popular brand of beer is named after him.
By the mid-sixteenth century most of the Taínos had either been killed or had melted away into the mountains. Recent investigations suggest Taino populations held out for many generations in the eastern part of the island around Baracoa.
Plunder and Piracy
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Cuba's location at the gateway to the Gulf of Mexico made it an important staging post for conquest, trade, and defense against French, Dutch, and English privateers. The large port of Havana quickly became a key rendezvous point for all the treasure-laden ships coming from Veracruz, Cartagena, and Portobello, before they set sail in flotilla to the Canary Islands and then Seville.
From Cuba, the Spanish exported fine woods, leather, citrus fruits, tobacco, and sugar, which was grown by slave labor on large plantations. The first evidence of African slaves in Cuba dates from 1513, and by the seventeenth century the slave trade was well established, with over a million slaves brought to the island. This increasingly lively commerce, together with constant military activity in the seas around the Americas, attracted the attention of pirates and privateers, who did much damage to coastal towns. Havana was sacked by the French pirate Jacques de Sores in 1555, prompting the building of impressive fortifications that dissuaded Francis Drake from doing the same in 1587.
A Brief British Occupation
In 1762 a large British armed fleet captured Havana, as part of a British offensive against Spain at the end of the Seven Years' War (1756–63). The British invaders immediately opened up trade between Cuba and Britain and its North American possessions. Within a year, however, Cuba and the Philippines were returned to the Spanish in exchange for Florida, by the Treaty of Paris in 1763. Unfortunately, the most lasting effect was a sharp escalation in the slave trade with Africa.
Sugar Rush
As the demand for sugar in Europe and North America soared, Cuba stepped up production and by 1827 it was the world's major producer. Sugar was to remain Cuba's principal export for nearly two hundred years, but production required massive slave labor. As slavery ended in Santo Domingo (today's Dominican Republic) in 1791 and Haiti in 1803, exiled slave owners flocked to eastern Cuba. The advent of steam power and railways in the mid-nineteenth century accelerated production and profit but made life even harsher for the slaves and other workers.
The early nineteenth century saw many Latin American countries win independence from Spain, but not Cuba — the profits from Cuba were too great. Criollo (creole) planters, born in Cuba of Spanish origin, resented the colonial power, wanting property rights and the right to develop their own capital. The mid-century emigration of poor Spaniards to Cuba and growing trade with the United States made this call both louder and more rational. But Spain clung fiercely to its cash cow, and it was not until 1878 that it conceded even promises of reform and autonomy.
Three Wars of Independence from Spain
The Ten Years' War (1868–78) was ignited when, in October 1868, Manuel de Céspedes, a criollo planter, freed all the slaves on his small plantation at La Demajagua and called for independence from Spain in a speech known to every Cuban as el Grito de Yara (the Cry of Yara). Thousands of freed slaves, peasants, and indentured laborers flocked to Céspedes' rebel army, led in the field by Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo. As the Spanish brought in more and more soldiers, the rebels, calling themselves mambises, after Juan Mambí, a Dominican freedom fighter, turned successfully to guerrilla warfare.
After Céspedes' death in 1874, a stalemate in 1878 led to the Pact of Zanjón, whereby the landowners and the Spanish agreed on some reforms, but it was swiftly followed by the unsuccesful uprising known as the Little War, in 1879–80. Although slavery was finally abolished in 1886, insurrection smoldered on.
In 1894 Spain cancelled a trade agreement between the US and Cuba, precipitating the Cuban War of Independence in 1895. The rebels sabotaged the sugar industry and Spanish property, and Spain retaliated by driving the rural population into concentration camps, where thousands died. The rebellion was led again by Gómez and Maceo, under the political inspiration of José Martí (see box). In 1897 Spain offered Cuba autonomy, but the rebels insisted on full independence.
The final chapter was played out in the brief Spanish–American War (1898), which erupted when an American battleship, USS Maine, blew up in mysterious circumstances in Havana harbor on February 15. Congress declared war on Spain on April 21; US forces won swift victories in eastern Cuba, and a treaty was signed in April 1899 giving Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the US.
The Pseudo-Republic
The defeat of Spain did not mean independence for Cuba, however. Cuba became nominally independent in 1902 under its first president, Tomás Estrada Palma, but Spanish rule was effectively replaced by the de facto rule of the US under the Platt Amendment, which gave the US the power to intervene at any time "for the preservation of Cuban independence [and] the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property and individual liberty." The US intervened four times in Cuba before the repeal of the agreement in 1934.
The Big US Sugar Boom
With most of its population poor, illiterate, and in ill health after years of war, Cuba was utterly dependent on the United States, which made no more effort to develop it than Spain had done. The sugar industry was modernized and mechanized but became a monopoly serving only the interests of the United States, the main market for Cuban sugar and the main investor in the industry.
By the mid-1920s, US companies controlled two-thirds of Cuban agriculture. The sugar boom of the 1920s paid for imposing public buildings and luxurious houses for the wealthy but gave nothing to the poor. US companies built roads and railways and installed banks, electricity, and the world's first automated telephone system, but repatriated all the profits.
The Cuban government had little political power or authority. Corruption bloomed, particularly under General Gerardo Machado (1925–33), while opposition from the labor movement and the political left was mercilessly repressed. Influenced by the ideas and propagandists of the Russian Revolution, the Cuban Communist Party was founded in 1925 and became strong in the labor movement.
Into this society Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was born on August 13, 1926, in the rural hamlet of Birán in the eastern province of Holguín. The illegitimate son of wealthy plantation owner Ángel María Bautista Castro y Argiz, and his maid Lina Ruz Gonzalez, the young Fidel experienced firsthand the hard lives of the rural poor working the cane fields.
The Rise of Batista
In 1933 massive opposition to Machado's government culminated in a general strike, and Machado fled into exile. Into the ensuing political confusion, which included a progressive but extremely short-lived government headed by Ramón Grau San Martín and Antonio Guiteras, stepped Fulgencio Batista, a young mulatto army officer, who seized power in January 1934.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Cuba by Mandy Macdonald, Russell Maddicks. Copyright © 2016 Kuperard. Excerpted by permission of Bravo Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Cover,Title Page,
Copyright,
About the Author,
Map of Cuba,
Introduction,
Key Facts,
Chapter 1: LAND AND PEOPLE,
Chapter 2: VALUES AND ATTITUDES,
Chapter 3: CUSTOMS AND TRADITIONS,
Chapter 4: MAKING FRIENDS,
Chapter 5: THE CUBANS AT HOME,
Chapter 6: TIME OUT,
Chapter 7: TRAVEL, HEALTH, AND SAFETY,
Chapter 8: BUSINESS BRIEFING,
Chapter 9: COMMUNICATING,
Further Reading,
Acknowledgments,