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Cuba: Caribbean Enigma
This book explores the geography, history and cultures of the one Caribbean island that has enticed world travellers for years.
It captures some of the Caribbean enigma whose protagonists are the Cuban people in their natural surroundings - including the art and architecture that surrounds them in Havana, Santiago de Cuba, Trinidad, Cienfuegos, Santa Clara and lesser known villas with splendid mansions, forts and churches.
Caribbean Enigma explores the geography, history, and culture of the one Caribbean island that has enticed world travellers for years.
There it lies, big and brassy, blocking the Caribbean from east to west. Explorers could not avoid it. Indigenous peoples from the North American continent and nearby islands sailed along its shores and continued their voyage south or settled into peaceable communities. The fate of indigenous peoples forever changed in 1492, when European fortune seekers arrived.
For four hundred years, the Greater Antilles was the destination dream of the new world, lending its fine harbors to the sanctimonious rape of the Americas and of Africa in the name of the Spanish Crown – which stripped forests to construct the ships that transported that wealth and established sugar plantations worked by black slaves for the profit of white masters.
The twentieth century was one of violent atonement and justification for this unredeemable history that also encompassed bits and pieces of beauty and nobility.
Cuba’s essential geography consists of three low-rising central mountain ranges that slope down to broad and fertile plains fringed by pristine beaches, of which Varadero is the best-known resort. The exotic flora and fauna on this lush island range from every variety of palm and cactus to a myriad of birds and butterflies and a colorful underwater world of tropical fish inhabiting coralline gardens.
The bright and bewildering kaleidoscope that is Cuba today is most accurately reflected in sound and image. Through its home-grown musicians, Cuba sizzles and syncopates around the world; but the color and texture of the island are more subtly reflected in images projected by painters and photographers.
This book captures some of the Caribbean enigma whose protagonists are the Cuban people in their natural surroundings – including the art and architecture that surrounds them in Havana, Santiago de Cuba, Trinidad, Cienfuegos, Santa Clara and lesser known villas with splendid mansions, forts and churches.
It captures some of the Caribbean enigma whose protagonists are the Cuban people in their natural surroundings - including the art and architecture that surrounds them in Havana, Santiago de Cuba, Trinidad, Cienfuegos, Santa Clara and lesser known villas with splendid mansions, forts and churches.
Caribbean Enigma explores the geography, history, and culture of the one Caribbean island that has enticed world travellers for years.
There it lies, big and brassy, blocking the Caribbean from east to west. Explorers could not avoid it. Indigenous peoples from the North American continent and nearby islands sailed along its shores and continued their voyage south or settled into peaceable communities. The fate of indigenous peoples forever changed in 1492, when European fortune seekers arrived.
For four hundred years, the Greater Antilles was the destination dream of the new world, lending its fine harbors to the sanctimonious rape of the Americas and of Africa in the name of the Spanish Crown – which stripped forests to construct the ships that transported that wealth and established sugar plantations worked by black slaves for the profit of white masters.
The twentieth century was one of violent atonement and justification for this unredeemable history that also encompassed bits and pieces of beauty and nobility.
Cuba’s essential geography consists of three low-rising central mountain ranges that slope down to broad and fertile plains fringed by pristine beaches, of which Varadero is the best-known resort. The exotic flora and fauna on this lush island range from every variety of palm and cactus to a myriad of birds and butterflies and a colorful underwater world of tropical fish inhabiting coralline gardens.
The bright and bewildering kaleidoscope that is Cuba today is most accurately reflected in sound and image. Through its home-grown musicians, Cuba sizzles and syncopates around the world; but the color and texture of the island are more subtly reflected in images projected by painters and photographers.
This book captures some of the Caribbean enigma whose protagonists are the Cuban people in their natural surroundings – including the art and architecture that surrounds them in Havana, Santiago de Cuba, Trinidad, Cienfuegos, Santa Clara and lesser known villas with splendid mansions, forts and churches.
144 pages, Hardcover
Published December 1, 2002
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