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Montemar, is also the Caribbean’s largest swamp and ideal for bird-watching, fly-fishing and spotting the odd sun-bathing crocodile. Topes de Collantes in the Sierra Escambray is one of the island’s most accessible and popular protected parks and has a plethora of waterfalls and junglelike trails. To the north, Parque Nacional Caguanes is a little-visited mix of mangrove and marine park that sits amid the Buenavista Unesco Biosphere Reserve. Parque Nacional Desembarco del Granma is a collection of plunging marine terraces where Fidel Castro mistakenly landed aboard his stricken yacht in 1956. Nearby, Cuba reaches its highest point in the Gran Parque Nacional Sierra Maestra, home of 1972m Pico Turquino. Parque Baconao Click here is a strange mix of ruined coffee haciendas, sheltered beaches and surreal stone dinosaurs. Things get clearer in the Parque Nacional Alejandro de Humboldt, an almost virgin Caribbean rainforest that registers Cuba’s highest levels of endemism.

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History

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PRE-COLUMBIAN HISTORY

FROM COLONY TO REPUBLIC

BETWEEN REPUBLIC & REVOLUTION

THE CUBAN REVOLUTION

CONSOLIDATING POWER

COLD WAR DEEP FREEZE

BUILDING SOCIALISM WORLDWIDE

CRISIS AS THE WALL FALLS

THE NEW LEFT TIDE

TIMELINE

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Embellished by breathless feats of revolutionary derring-do, and plagued routinely by meddling armies of foreign invaders, Cuban history has achieved a level of importance way out of proportion to its size. Indeed, with its strategic position slap-bang in the middle of the Caribbean and its geographic closeness to its powerful US neighbor to the north, the historical annals of the Cuban archipelago often read more like the script of an action-packed Hollywood movie production than a dull end-of-year school exam paper. Read on.

PRE-COLUMBIAN HISTORY

According to exhaustive carbon dating, Cuba has been inhabited by humans for over 4000 years. The first known civilization to settle on the island were the Guanahatabeys, a primitive Stone Age people who lived in caves around Viñales in Pinar del Río province and eked out a meager existence as hunter-gatherers. At some point over the ensuing 2000 years the Guanahatabeys were gradually displaced by the arrival of a new preceramic culture known as the Siboneys, a significantly more developed group of fishermen and small-scale farmers who settled down comparatively peacefully on the archipelago’s sheltered southern coast.

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Get the Cuba news hot off the press at www.cubaheadlines.com.

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The island’s third and most important pre-Columbian civilization, the Taínos (see boxed text,) first started arriving in Cuba around AD 1100 in a series of waves, concluding a migration process that had begun in the Orinoco River delta in South America several centuries earlier. Taíno culture was more developed and sophisticated than that of its two archaic predecessors; the adults practiced a form of cranial transformation by flattening the soft skulls of their young children (flat foreheads were thought to be a sign of great beauty). Related to the Greater Antilles Arawaks, the new natives were skillful farmers, weavers and boat-builders, and their complex society boasted an organized system of participatory government that was overseen by series of local caciques (chiefs). Taínos are thought to be responsible for pioneering approximately 60% of the crops still grown in Cuba today and they were the first of the world’s pre-Columbian cultures to nurture the delicate tobacco plant into a form that could easily be processed for smoking.

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FROM COLONY TO REPUBLIC

When Columbus neared Cuba on October 27, 1492, he described it as ‘the most beautiful land human eyes had ever seen,’ naming it Juana in honor of a Spanish heiress. But deluded in his search for the kingdom of the Great Khan, and finding little gold in Cuba’s lush and heavily forested interior, Columbus quickly abandoned the territory in favor of Hispaniola (modern-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic).

The colonization