History of Cuba: From Indigenous Peoples to the Quest for Identity

Published on January 17, 2026 and written by Cyril Jarnias

The history of the country of Cuba is often told as a face-off between Spanish colonizers, African slaves, and bearded revolutionaries emerging from the Sierra Maestra. But behind this well-known triptych lies an older and more complex plot, where the voices of Indigenous peoples, long declared “extinct,” are today returning to unsettle certainties. From the Cueva del Paraíso in Baracoa to the lost homesteads of the eastern mountains, Cuba’s memory is limited neither to 1492 nor to 1959.

To trace the history of Cuba is therefore to tell the story of both conquest and resistance, slavery and revolutions, but also the slow reappearance of Indigenous roots that centuries of colonization, intermixing, and scholarly discourse had claimed to erase.

Origins: Cuba, Island of the Taíno and Ancient Peoples

Long before Christopher Columbus’s caravels approached the shores of Baracoa, the island had already been a human crossroads for millennia. The oldest known sites, like Levisa, date back to the 4th millennium BCE. Neolithic cultures identified under names like Cayo Redondo or Guayabo Blanco, mainly in the west, lived from fishing, hunting, and gathering, with polished stone and shell tools.

Among these ancient groups, the Guanajatabey long occupied the western part of the island. They were pushed toward these margins by the gradual arrival of Arawakan populations—the Ciboneys, then the Taíno—coming from the South American continent, likely in stages from the Amazon basin and the Orinoco Valley.

Taíno Society: A Caribbean Already Globalized

The Taíno were organized farmers in chiefdoms, the cacicazgos. The island of Cuba had 29 at the time of the European arrival, several of which left names that have become iconic: Havana, Baracoa, Bayamo, Camagüey, Batabanó retain the lexical trace of this world.

Their society was hierarchical but far from primitive. It was based on two main social classes:

Class	Main Role	Characteristics
Naborías	Base community	Agricultural work, fishing, hunting, construction
Nitaínos	Nobles and local elites	Subordinate chiefs, warriors, intermediaries of power

At the top reigned the cacique, a political and religious leader, whose power was transmitted through the maternal line. He lived in a rectangular house, the caney, while the rest of the population lived in circular houses, the bohíos. The priest-healers, the bohíques, combined medicinal knowledge, ritual roles, and functions as intermediaries with the deities, the zemís.

A Subtle Economy: Conucos, Canoas, and Casabe

The Taíno developed a sophisticated agricultural system based on small mounds, the conucos, which ensured drainage, fertility, and protection of tropical soils. The main crop was cassava (yuca), transformed into a dry bread, casabe, capable of long-term preservation.

This was associated with other essential productions:

Product	Main Use
Corn	Consumed roasted, used for a fermented drink (chicha), but not made into bread
Beans, squash, chili peppers	Base of the plant-based diet
Peanuts, pineapple, guavas	Common consumption
Tobacco	Medicinal and ritual use (smoked or inhaled)
Cotton, gourds	Textiles, containers, everyday objects

Fishing and hunting complemented this diet: fish caught with harpoons, nets, in fish traps, or stunned using toxic plants; manatees, turtles, waterfowl for meat; shellfish on mangrove roots. The Taíno used large canoes, the kanoa, capable of carrying up to a hundred people, explaining the speed of their regional expansion.

The linguistic legacy of this world is far from gone: hamaca (hammock), barbacoa (barbecue), canoa (canoe), tabaco (tobacco), sabana (savanna), juracán (hurricane) are all Taíno words that passed into Spanish and then into other languages.

1492: Encounter, Conquest, and Organized Erasure

The first documented encounter between Europeans and the Taíno on Cuban territory took place in Baracoa in November 1492. Columbus described a welcoming, generous population, “simple” by his criteria, sometimes with admiration tinged with condescension. He planted a cross on the shore, an inaugural gesture of a domination that would quickly turn to violence.

From the Cross to the Encomienda

Within a few decades, the Spanish conquest radically transformed the island. Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, departing from Hispaniola in 1511, founded Baracoa as the first permanent settlement and proceeded to create colonial villas. Indigenous resistance was quickly broken: leaders like Hatuey, who came from Hispaniola to mobilize Cubans against the invaders, were captured and executed.

The estimates of Bartolomé de Las Casas, often considered excessive, speak of hundreds of thousands of deaths. Contemporary historians cite lower but equally staggering figures. In Cuba as in Hispaniola, the main destructive force was the combination of colonial violence, the collapse of social structures, and epidemic shocks.

A Legal and Administrative Genocide

Over time, the Spanish crown sought to curb the most flagrant abuses, notably via the New Laws promulgated in the mid-16th century. On paper, Indigenous people could no longer be enslaved. In practice, the use of Indigenous labor continued until the demographic collapse.

The objective is clear: to annihilate any legal basis for potential Indigenous land claims.

José Barreiro, intellectual and member of the Taíno Nation of the Antilles

In the courts, the final Indigenous legal appeals failed. The last lawsuit based on Indigenous property titles was rejected in 1850. Officially, there were no more “Indians” in Cuba.

The Other Great Pillar of Colonial Cuba: African Slavery

The programmed disappearance of the Taíno did not mean that Cuba emptied. On the contrary, it opened a new tragic chapter: large-scale slave trafficking. While the first African captives arrived in the 16th century, it was especially from the end of the 18th century that the island became one of the main receivers of the transatlantic slave trade.

The numbers convey the scale of the tragedy:

Period / Indicator	Estimate
African slaves disembarked in Cuba (3 centuries)	> 600,000 (some studies mention 800,000 to over one million)
Slaves in the total population (peak)	up to nearly one third of inhabitants
Enslaved population (1770s → 1840s)	39,000 → ~400,000
Key years of the slave trade	mainly 1780–1860

The sugar boom, intensified after the Haitian Revolution which destroyed Saint-Domingue as a competitor, transformed the island into the world’s “sugar factory.” By the mid-19th century, Cuba supplied nearly a third of the world’s sugar production, driven by large plantations and increasingly mechanized sugar mills, equipped with steam engines and narrow-gauge railways.

In the 19th century, an increasingly hostile international context toward the slave trade and slavery led Spain to sign treaties to first limit, then officially abolish the traffic. In theory, the slave trade was banned from 1820. In practice, smuggling continued until the 1860s, and slavery itself was not abolished in Cuba until 1886, making the island one of the last territories in the New World to officially abandon it.

The Wars of Independence: Toward the Republic, Without the Indians

19th-century Cuba was also shaped by another great struggle: that for independence from Spain. Three main wars shook the island between 1868 and 1898, in a context mixing nationalist claims, abolitionism, racial tensions, and international stakes.

This rhetoric of unity had a paradoxical effect: by dissolving differences, it further relegated Indigenous specificity. In the emerging new nation, there was no longer any place for distinct “Indians”: at best, everyone was Cuban.

This pattern would extend well beyond the break with Spain, until after the 1959 revolution.

From American Occupation to the Castro Revolution: A Well-Known History

From 1898 onward, Cuba’s history is better documented and more familiar: the Spanish-American War, American military occupation, the establishment of a republic tightly controlled by Washington (Platt Amendment, Guantánamo Bay, repeated interventions), the rise of military dictatorships, and then the overthrow of the Fulgencio Batista regime by the July 26 Movement led by Fidel Castro.

The 1959 revolution ushered in a new phase: massive nationalizations, a break with the United States, alignment with the Soviet Union, the Missile Crisis, internationalist interventions, and the construction of a socialist state. This sequence has been the subject of countless analyses, as has the gigantic economic crisis caused by the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, known as the “Special Period.”

After 1959, the promotion of a single identity—that of the cubano—left little room for distinct expressions, whether racial, religious, or ethnic. During the Soviet years, research on contemporary Indigenous presence often met with indifference or skepticism from the authorities.

Yet it was in this context that the unexpected return of the Taíno was being prepared.

The Shock of the Special Period and the Return of Roots

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Cuba lost most of its trading partners and the subsidies that kept its economy running. The country plunged into an unprecedented crisis, officially named the “Special Period in Time of Peace.”

The numbers of this economic earthquake are dizzying:

Indicator	Change (1989–1993)
Total GDP	-35 to -50%
GDP per capita	– more than 50%
Total Imports	-75 to -80%
Exports	– more than 80%
Agricultural Production	– about 47%
Sugar Production	from 7.3 to 4.1 million tons
Construction	– around 70–75%
Industrial Capacity	drop reaching up to 90%
Imported Oil	reduced to 10% of previous levels

Daily life collapsed: drastic rationing, power outages lasting 16 to 20 hours a day, public transport almost paralyzed, shortage of medicines, an average weight loss of the population of nearly nine kilograms, an epidemic of optic neuropathy linked to a Vitamin B deficiency.

When the Economy Staggers, Traditional Knowledge Reappears

In this context of deep crisis, another phenomenon occurred in the background: Cuban society began to revalue knowledge and practices long relegated to the margins. The fall of the Soviet model, the crumbling of grand ideological narratives, and anxiety about the future opened a space for the rediscovery of rural traditions, popular medicines, and resilient agricultural techniques.

Almost involuntarily, the Special Period forced Cuba to reconnect with ways of life largely inherited from the Taíno substrate, even if the official language continued to speak in terms of “peasant traditions” or campesino knowledge.

Baracoa and Living Archaeology: “El Arqueólogo” and the Cueva del Paraíso

If one seeks a symbolic place where this Indigenous memory began to reassert itself, one must look to the eastern tip of the island, toward Baracoa—the first Spanish town, but also the gateway to Cuba’s pre-Columbian world.

It is there that a man, Roberto Ordúñez Fernández, began at age 17, over forty years ago, a patient collection of remains in the hills and caves surrounding the town. Through excavations, walks in the rain, and swings of the pickaxe, he uncovered an abundance of Taíno material: pottery, tools, idols, bones.

The inhabitants simply nicknamed him “el arqueólogo” (the archaeologist). In a region where institutional means are scarce, he occupies a singular place: self-taught, trained in contact with Antonio Núñez Jiménez—a former revolutionary turned archaeologist who had once fought alongside Fidel Castro—he embodies this unexpected bridge between the revolutionary saga and the quest for more distant roots.

In its display cases, visitors can notably see the bones discovered in a cave in Boma, which Ordúñez’s team identifies as a possible burial site of the cacique Guamá, the Taíno chief who led a resistance of nearly a decade against the Spanish. On the site itself, a reconstructed tomb serves as a place of remembrance.

Archaeology, School, and Areítos: Reinventing the Indigenous

In Boma, an isolated village accessible by muddy paths, Ordúñez conceived a simple but ambitious pedagogical project: integrating archaeology and Taíno culture into the local school curriculum. Children learn to distinguish a Taíno mortar from a simple stone, to respect burial sites, to recognize fragments of ceramics.

A significant fact: the state, long reluctant to allow specific identity expressions to flourish, shows more tolerance here, notably because it sees tourist potential. For the village families, these activities have an immediate merit: “the children are occupied,” explains a resident whose husband claims Taíno ancestry. Between cultural transmission, economic tinkering, and child management, the Indigenous renaissance takes root in daily life.

In the caves east of Bariguá, Ordúñez and his colleagues continue to document petroglyphs, iron oxide paintings representing human silhouettes, marine animals, perhaps a lizard. Some images have been scratched, vandalized, proof that this heritage remains vulnerable, even to the actions of the armed forces: the entrance to one of the caverns was partially walled up by the Cuban army, leaving only an arrow slit to observe the surroundings.

The Gran Cemí de Patana: A Taíno God in Exile

One of the most striking symbols of this confiscated past is found… in the United States. In the 1910s, American archaeologist Mark Raymond Harrington explored the caverns of La Patana, a set of caves lost in a landscape of sharp rocks, accessible only by horse or a rattling old 4×4.

In one of these caverns, behind an antechamber that draws the eye toward the ceiling and not the floor, he finally noticed a large stalagmite about 1.20 meters tall, carved into a wide-based Taíno idol. This is the “Gran Cemí de Patana”, a major representation of a deity, likely placed there for centuries.

Today, the base of the Gran Cemí is still visible in the cave of La Patana. Next to it, petroglyphs long ignored during the first explorations remind us that the place was not just a backdrop but a living sanctuary.

He insists on one principle: “to work with facts” and to be wary of what he calls *jineteros intelectuales*, these opportunists of identity discourse.

Alexis Morales Prado, former prosecutor and employee of the National Enterprise for the Protection of Flora and Fauna

A Taíno museum project in the region was supposed to open its doors, it was announced, by the end of 2016. In the meantime, Morales travels to local schools to tell about fishing and hunting techniques, some language elements, and teach children to distinguish a simple rock from an archaeological object. In La Patana, the school has eight students; the village is practically deserted during visits. But in the mental maps being redrawn, this corner of Cuba once again becomes a center, no longer a periphery.

Negotiations for the restitution of the Gran Cemí are underway between Cuba and the United States. The Smithsonian expects to receive a formal repatriation request. This prospect encapsulates the current challenge: returning to Cuba material fragments of its Indigenous memory, long exported to museums of the North.

Taíno or Not Taíno? Genes, Customs, and Identity Debates

The question of whether there are still “living” Taíno has been debated for decades. For a long time, the institutional answer has been negative: the Taíno would have disappeared, absorbed into a generalized mixing, surviving only as diluted genetic traces and cultural fragments integrated into a broader “creolity.”

Yet, a set of anthropological, historical, and genetic evidence invites us to nuance, even overturn, this view.

The Archives Say Otherwise

As early as the 19th century, diplomats, anthropologists, and travelers reported the presence of communities with a strong Amerindian component in eastern Cuba: Guanabacoa, El Caney, Jiguaní, Sierra Maestra, Yateras, Baracoa. Some spoke of “full-blood” families, others of villages “reserved for Indians.” Recurrent surnames—Gainsa, Azahares, Rojas, Ramírez—are found in these refuge zones.

Genes Confirm Continuity

A decisive turning point comes from genetics. A study conducted in Puerto Rico in 2003 showed that 61% of tested individuals possessed mitochondrial DNA of Amerindian origin. This means that, from the maternal point of view, a clear majority of the population descends from Indigenous women. These data are consistent with what is known of colonial dynamics: European men taking Indigenous wives or companions, and later, mixing with enslaved Africans.

Analogous research in other islands (Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic) and in South America confirms the idea that the proclaimed disappearance of the Taíno is more a political discourse than a biological fact.

The fact of recognizing a creolization, a mixing of heritages, does not imply the disappearance of the Indigenous components. On the contrary, one can speak of Amerindian continuity within creole societies themselves.

Anthropologists Antonio Curet and Ranald Woodaman

Being Taíno, Being Cuban: Between Customs and Feelings

In Cuba, the question remains delicate. For Baracoa historian Alejandro Hartmann, contemporary Taíno identity is defined less by physical traits than by a set of practices and beliefs: respect for “Mother Earth” and “Father Sun,” asking permission from entities like Osaín before harvesting, ceremonial use of sacred trees, persistence of certain forms of rural sociability.

Many people interviewed in eastern Cuba alternate between ambiguous self-designations: “Indio,” “mestizo,” “Cubano,” depending on context, administrative situation, or external gaze. In a Baracoa tattoo parlor, Aztec or Mayan motifs are offered, but rarely Taíno symbols, revealing a paradox: the globalized Indigenous is more visible than the local Indigenous.

For artist Mildo Matos, born in Guantánamo province, the awareness of his Taíno roots was gradual. His family lived in bohíos, ate casabe, cultivated ancient varieties, practiced discreet rituals. It was only upon leaving his village to attend art school in the city that he understood the singular character of this way of life. Today, he paints Taíno gods with a surrealist aesthetic inspired by European traditions: a way of showing that contemporary Indigenous identity is also a process of personal interpretation, a dialogue between heritages.

The Great Rojas-Ramírez Family: A Cacique in Revolutionary Cuba

Among the communities symbolizing this Amerindian survival, the Rojas-Ramírez families hold a special place. Scattered across more than twenty localities in eastern Cuba, they form what Hartmann calls “the Gran Familia“—about 4,000 people who share kinship ties, a history of forced displacements, and a memory of times when Indians lived in legally recognized towns, like San Luis de los Caneyes (El Caney), near Santiago.

In the 19th century, when the Spanish monarchy revoked the Indigenous jurisdiction of El Caney in 1850, many of these families were pushed toward more remote areas, mountain palenques like La Ranchería or La Escondida, in the municipality of Caridad de los Indios. There, they established small farms where cassava, malanga, boniato, rice, corn, and beans thrived on steep slopes.

In 2014, he presented his community at a national and international conference on Indigenous cultures, symbolically breaking the barrier of “extinction.” His daughter Idalis accompanies him in these representational efforts. When his granddaughter was baptized, it was a 94-year-old woman, Doña Luisa, who officiated, mixing water, herbs, and prayers addressed to the sun and moon. A ceremony “almost Christian,” they say, but whose ritual architecture clearly refers to pre-Christian cosmologies.

For Panchito, the essential lies in global respect: for the child, for the parents, for the community, for nature, and for God—a God who is no longer solely that of catechisms, but also that of the mountains and ancestors.

Panchito

When Indigenous Knowledge Saves Lives

The trajectory of the Rojas-Ramírez family illuminates another often-forgotten aspect: the role of these communities in the country’s resilience during the Special Period. When large state farms collapsed for lack of fuel and spare parts, and food imports grew scarce, it was the traditional crops of the “Indios campesinos” in the mountains that allowed many families to avoid starvation.

Hardy tubers, medicinal plants, ancestral preservation techniques offered safety nets where the industrial system had failed. Today, young researchers and activists are examining this “indigenidad en la cubanía”, this Indigenous presence within Cubanness, to document it, value it, and transmit it.

Spiritualities, Myths, and Objects: A Cosmology Still Speaking

At the heart of the Taíno worldview, past and reinterpreted, are the zemís, these spirit-deities associated with natural forces, ancestors, sometimes materialized as idols of wood, stone, or clay. Among the most important:

Zemí	Domain / Function
Atabey	Moon, fresh waters, fertility, maternity
Yúcahu	Cassava, sea, food abundance
Iguanaboína	Favorable weather
Boinayel and Marohu	Rain and clear sky
Baibrama	Growth of cassava
Maquetaurie Guayaba	Land of the dead
Opiyelguabirán	Guardian of souls, in dog form
Deminán Caracaracol	Cultural hero, mythical ancestor

Petroglyphs representing these figures are engraved in the rock of sites like La Patana. Some zemís take the form of three-pointed stones, planted in the conucos to protect crops; others have trays intended to hold hallucinogenic powders, like cohoba, taken during ceremonies to communicate with the invisible.

When artists like Mildo Matos today reinterpret these figures in their paintings, or when communities in eastern Cuba still address prayers to the moon and sun, it is this symbolic continuity that manifests itself, despite historical ruptures.

A Cuban History Rewritten from the Margins

Rereading the history of the country of Cuba from these fragments means accepting that it is reduced neither to the “discovery” of 1492 nor to the revolutionary epic of 1959. It means recognizing that between the two, and beyond, peoples and practices were systematically relegated outside the national narrative.

It is not about denying the importance of Spanish, African, Chinese contributions or other migrations in the formation of Cuban society. Nor about claiming that there exist today “pure” Taíno, frozen in time. Contemporary Indigenous communities are products of centuries of intermixing, displacements, adjustments.

But archaeological data, colonial archives, genetic studies, and current testimonies converge to affirm at least three things:

2. Their erasure was as much political and symbolic as demographic. The imposition of Spanish surnames, the suppression of Indigenous jurisdictions, the scholarly denial of their existence served colonial and national interests, simplifying the identity narrative.

3. The economic and ideological crisis of the late 20th century reopened a space for their reappearance. The Special Period, the Soviet collapse, paradoxically opened the way to a rediscovery of Indigenous knowledge, the rise of initiatives like the museums of Baracoa and Maisí, and the public voice of caciques like Panchito Ramírez.

The history of the country Cuba can then be read as a palimpsest: over the colonial and republican, then socialist writing, reappear the older traces of an island shaped by Arawak journeys, the songs of the areítos, the smoke of ritual tobacco, and the furrows traced by the coa. The historical and political task that opens consists less in opposing these layers than in learning to read them together.

For behind the slogan often heard in the mountains of the Oriente—”we are Cubans above all“—today slips a new nuance: “but we never stopped being also, in a certain way, Taíno.”