1492–1898: From the Colonial Conquest to the War of Independence

In search of a sea route to the west, via the “Ocean Sea,” leading to the wealth of Asia, Spanish explorers reached the northeast coast of Cuba on October 27, 1492. They had already landed in various parts of the Bahamas archipelago a few days earlier. The place of their very first landing in Cuba was exactly Playa Blanca of the Bahía de Bariay, which today is part of the municipality of Rafael Freyre in the present-day province of Holguín. Sailing on behalf of the Catholic Monarchs Isabel I of Castile and Fernando II of Aragon, the Genoese admiral Christopher Columbus initially believed that this was Japan, referred to as Cipango (from the Latinized Mandarin rìběnguó) in Marco Polo’s Il Milione of 1298. All the more so as this land was already populated. On the eve of the conquistadors’ arrival, the island of Cuba had a total Amerindian population of several tens of thousands of individuals—probably around 100,000.