History of The Spanish Caribbean: a timeline

21 moments in the history of The Spanish Caribbean, in order, each with what happened and why it matters.

Eras

  1. Before 1492 (15000 BC–1492)
  2. Empire and the colonial Americas (1492–1808)
  3. Revolutions and new nations (1808–1898)
  4. Revolution, war and dictatorship (1898–1975)
  5. Democracy and today (1975–)

Before 1492 (15000 BC–1492)

  1. 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…

Empire and the colonial Americas (1492–1808)

  1. 12 October 1492: Columbus reaches America — Christopher Columbus, a sailor most historians agree came from Genoa, persuaded Isabel and Fernando to back a voyage west to Asia; the agreement was signed at…
  2. 1512: The Laws of Burgos — In December 1511 the Dominican Antonio de Montesinos preached a sermon on Hispaniola asking the colonists by what right they held the Taíno in servitude.
  3. c. 16 November 1519: Havana is founded — San Cristóbal de La Habana was first settled in 1515 on Cuba's south coast, one of the seven towns founded under Diego Velázquez, and moved in 1519 to the…
  4. 1535: The Viceroyalty of New Spain is created — Fourteen years after the fall of Tenochtitlan, Charles V replaced the quarrelling conquerors and the first Audiencia with a viceroy, a 'vice-king' who…
  5. 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.
  6. 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…
  7. 7 June 1762–1763: The British take Havana — Spain entered the Seven Years' War on France's side late in 1761, and in 1762 Britain struck at the key of the Spanish Caribbean.
  8. c. 1765–1788: The Bourbon reforms — Under Charles III (1759–88) the Crown set out to govern the Americas more tightly and profitably.

Revolutions and new nations (1808–1898)

  1. 6 September 1815: Bolívar writes the Jamaica Letter — In 1815 the cause of independence looked lost.
  2. 17 December 1819–17 November 1831: Gran Colombia, Bolívar's republic — On 17 December 1819 the Congress of Angostura passed the Fundamental Law that united Venezuela and New Granada in a single Republic of Colombia; the province…
  3. 27 February 1844: Dominican independence from Haiti — The Spanish-speaking east of Hispaniola had a different road to nationhood.
  4. October 1886: The abolition of slavery in Cuba — Cuba's sugar plantations made it one of the last slave societies in the Americas.
  5. 24 February 1895–1898: José Martí and the Cuban War of Independence — José Martí, born in Havana in 1853 to poor Spanish immigrants, was sentenced to hard labour at sixteen for his writings against Spain, exiled, educated in…
  6. 1898: The Disaster of '98 — Most of Spain's American empire had won independence in the 1810s and 1820s, but Cuba and Puerto Rico remained, along with the Philippines.

Revolution, war and dictatorship (1898–1975)

  1. October 1899–3 November 1903: The Thousand Days' War and the loss of Panama — Colombia's last and bloodiest civil war of the nineteenth century began in October 1899, when Liberals rose against the Conservative government.
  2. 15 August 1914: The Panama Canal opens — The United States, having backed Panama's separation from Colombia in November 1903, signed the Hay–Bunau-Varilla treaty with the new republic's French envoy:…
  3. 6 December 1928: The banana massacre at Ciénaga — In November 1928 the workers of the United Fruit Company's banana plantations in Magdalena, on Colombia's Caribbean coast, struck for written contracts, a…
  4. 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…
  5. 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.

Democracy and today (1975–)

  1. 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…

Changes over time