Although Cuba, like the rest of the Americas, was home to an indigenous population before colonial conquest and the arrival of European colonialists, most of the native people died as a result of imported disease from Europe. The Spanish were the initial colonial power to control Cuba in the late 15th century. Under Spanish dominion, settlers established sugar cane and tobacco as Cuba’s primary products. As the indigenous population died out, the trans-Atlantic slave trade proliferated, and African slaves were imported to work on the plantations. This kind of “plantation society,” typical of the colonial Caribbean, continued until slavery was abolished in 1886.

Cuba was the last major Spanish colony to gain independence, following a 50-year struggle begun in 1850. The final push for independence began in 1895, when Jose Marti, Cuba’s national hero, announced the “Grito de Baire” (“Call to arms from Baire”). In 1898, after the USS Maine sank in Havana harbor on Feb. 15 due to an explosion of undetermined origin, the United States entered the conflict. In December of that year, Spain relinquished control of Cuba to the United States with the Treaty of Paris.

On May 20, 1902, the United States granted Cuba its independence, but retained the right to intervene to preserve Cuban independence and stability under the Platt Amendment. In 1934, the amendment was repealed and the United States and Cuba reaffirmed the 1903 agreement that leased the Guantanamo Bay naval base to the United States. This treaty remains in force, and U.S. occupancy of the base, which shares a 29-km boundary with Cuba at the eastern tip of the island, can only be terminated by mutual agreement or abandonment by the United States.

Until 1959, Cuba was often ruled by military figures, who obtained or remained in power by force. At that time, however, the influence of Marxist revolutionary thought swept across Latin America. In particular, Che Guevara, a South American revolutionary, acted as a catalyst in the movement throughout the region and was a key player in the ensuing Cuban Revolution. Finally, Fulgencio Batista, who had risen from army sergeant to be Cuba’s dictator for more than 25 years, fled on Jan. 1, 1959, as Fidel Castro’s “26th of July Movement” gained control.

Castro had established the movement in Mexico, where he was exiled after he led a failed attack on the Moncada army barracks at Santiago de Cuba on July 26, 1953. This date is referred to in the annals of Cuban revolutionary history as “Rebellion Day.” In 1959, within months of taking power, Castro moved to consolidate control by imprisoning or executing opponents. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans fled the island.

Castro declared Cuba a socialist state on April 16, 1961. This move caused relations between Cuba and the West, especially the United States, to deteriorate. For the next 30 years, Castro pursued close relations with the Soviet Union until the advent of “perestroika” (restructuring) and the subsequent demise of the U.S.S.R. During that time Cuba received substantial economic and military assistance from the U.S.S.R, estimated at $5.6 billion annually, which kept Cuba’s economy afloat and enabled it to maintain an enormous military establishment.

Also in April 1961, virtually coterminous with Castro’s official declaration that Cuba was a one-party socialist state, a force of rather ill-equipped anti-communist Cuban exiles, backed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, made an abortive attack on Cuba in an incident that became known as the Bay of Pigs invasion. The operation was apparently launched under a misconception that it would spark an island-wide popular revolt against Castro. In any case, the effort proved a total failure within 72 hours, with more than 100 of the attackers killed and others imprisoned for years to come in Cuban jails. The serious breach in U.S.-Cuban relations that it exposed widened further a year and a half later, in a two-week-long episode of nuclear brinkmanship since referred to as the Cuban missile crisis.

In 1962, a year after direct bilateral relations between Cuba and the United States had been severed altogether, Cuban-Soviet ties led to a confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union over the installation of nuclear-equipped missiles in Cuba. The U.S. imposed a naval blockade, intercepting all ships bound for the island. The crisis was resolved when the U.S.S.R. agreed to withdraw the missiles and other offensive weapons.

In the 1970s, attempts were made to regularize bilateral relations between the United States and Cuba, but normalization talks ended in 1975 when Cuba launched a large-scale intervention in Angola. Nevertheless, in 1977, the U.S. and Cuba did establish interest sections in each other’s capitals. The deployment of Cuban troops to Ethiopia, and the discovery of Soviet troops in Cuba in 1979, however, reversed much of the diplomatic progress made between the two countries. When Ronald Reagan became the U.S. president in 1981, policies to counteract Marxist movements in Latin America, identified with Cuban influences, became a hallmark of his administration.

By the 1980s, a number of Cubans attempted to seek asylum in the United States. In response, the two countries quietly resumed the process of ameliorating diplomatic relations, though various incidents in the region, such as the American-led invasion of Grenada which led to the withdrawal of Cuban forces stationed on that island, ultimately stymied any real progress.

In April 1980, 10,000 Cubans stormed the Peruvian embassy in Havana seeking political asylum. Eventually, the Cuban government allowed 125,000 Cubans to board boats bound for the United States—a nominally illegal act—and sail from the port of Mariel. The exodus became known as the “Mariel boatlift.” One interpretation of this event, which gained some currency in the United States, was that Castro was conveniently lowering the island’s population of “undesirables” (a proportion of the Mariel emigrants had criminal records in Cuba), while simultaneously trimming Cuba’s social-welfare burden, which would have a marginally positive effect in keeping the island’s struggling economy afloat. Regardless, the Mariel episode spotlighted the fact that many Cubans would gladly emigrate if they could.

In 1984, the United States and Cuba negotiated an agreement to resume a normalized limited annual quota of Cuban immigration to the U.S. This policy had been interrupted in the wake of the Mariel boatlift. The new agreement also authorized the forced return to Cuba of immigrants deemed excludable under U.S. law. Cuba suspended this agreement in May 1985 following the U.S. initiation of Radio Marti broadcasts to Cuba, but the agreement was reinstated in November 1987. Since the inception of these broadcasts, Cuba has jammed TV Marti and blocked Radio Marti on the AM band. Radio Marti on shortwave, however, has a large Cuban audience.

By 1991, Soviet subsidies to Cuba ended with the fall of the Soviet Union, and former Soviet military personnel in Cuba, estimated to number 15,000 in 1990, were finally withdrawn in 1993. Russia still maintains a signal intelligence-gathering facility at Lourdes and has provided funding to preserve the still-uncompleted nuclear power plant at Juragua.

In 1994, regular immigration talks were re-initiated between the United States and Cuba, prompted by another mass exodus of Cubans that summer. Other measures and concords were established between the two countries later in the 1990s, although full diplomatic ties remain unrealized.

To date, Cuba remains a socialist country, under the leadership of the Castro regime. While Castro has established more progressive measures, as exemplified by constitutional changes that allowed citizens to practice their religious beliefs openly, Cuba is still regarded as something of a political and economic pariah in the Western Hemisphere, though its relations with most other Latin American countries are much more positive than they are with the United States