The Spanish Caribbean

El Caribe hispano

Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico share a sea, a fast and friendly Spanish, and a vocabulary inherited from the Taíno, the first people the Spanish met in America: canoa, hamaca, huracán, barbacoa, tabaco. Strangers are mi amor, the diminutive goes on everything, and a very sweet coffee is bought at a window in the street.

Each island has its own rhythm. Havana's Sunday is spent on the Malecón, the eight-kilometre seafront wall, with fishermen and a trio playing son; in the Dominican Republic February belongs to the carnival of La Vega, where limping devils in handmade masks are entitled to hit you with a bladder; in Puerto Rico, the enormous fortress of El Morro, begun by the Spanish in 1539, still guards the entrance to the bay of San Juan.

History

History of The Spanish Caribbean: a timeline (21 moments of its history)

Start with

  • between 1200 and 1492: The Taíno of the Greater Antilles — By about 1200 the people later called Taíno, descendants of Arawak-speaking migrants from South America, had settled Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, the…
  • 1585–28 January 1596: Drake raids the Spanish Caribbean — Francis Drake, 'El Draque' to the Spaniards, had robbed the mule trains at Nombre de Dios in 1572 and the silver ship Cacafuego off Peru in 1579.
  • 26 March 1713–1750: The slave asiento goes to Britain — From the sixteenth century the Crown sold the asiento, a monopoly contract to supply enslaved Africans to its American colonies, to Portuguese, Genoese, Dutch…
  • 6 September 1815: Bolívar writes the Jamaica Letter — In 1815 the cause of independence looked lost.
  • 27 February 1844: Dominican independence from Haiti — The Spanish-speaking east of Hispaniola had a different road to nationhood.
  • 1 January 1959: The Cuban Revolution — In the early hours of 1 January 1959 the dictator Fulgencio Batista fled Cuba as the guerrilla army of Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement, which had fought…
  • 14–28 October 1962: The Cuban Missile Crisis — After the Bay of Pigs, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro secretly agreed to place Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba to deter another invasion.
  • c. 2015: The Venezuelan exodus — Venezuela, once the richest country in South America and a magnet for immigrants from Spain, Italy, Portugal and Colombia, has in a decade become the source of…

Culture

Culture of The Spanish Caribbean

Food and drink

  • El cafecito cubano — A thimble of very sweet coffee with a foam on top, bought at a window in the street; a colada is the big one, for sharing between four or five at work.

Festivals and celebrations

  • Carnaval de La Vega — Every Sunday in February a Dominican town fills with limping devils in handmade papier-mâché masks who are entitled to hit you, from behind, with an inflated bladder. It hurts; that is the point.

Literature and storytelling

History

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