Antonia married Victor Ribas and gave birth to a succession of girls. She loved her daughters, but resented the fact that while his former mistress gave him two boys, she could only manage to produce females. She decided to do a novena to Our Lady of Charity, Cuba’s Patron Saint, …
2015: Pope Francis becomes the third Papal Pontiff to visit the island of Cuba. Pope Benedict XVI visited in 2012, and Pope John Paul II made the first papal trip in 1998.
2016: Fidel Castro dies in Havana, Cuba on November 25th.
They wandered to the port looking out over the bay. Many boats were docked: the white-hulled Maine, the Commercial Steamer of Washington, and the Spanish boats, the warship Alfonso XII and Legazpi bobbing in the water. Pedro had arranged for a late supper at an outdoor café near the harbor. …
Don Edouard D’Estrade, in his early twenties, was from a family of French farmers, refugees from the French Revolution. A dozen years after finding safe haven on Hispaniola, in the midst of the Haitian upheaval, Edward saw his parents slaughtered. He was able to flee, with a cadre of slaves …
Her father was a refugee, an immigrant, twice. When Thomas Jefferson bought Louisiana from Napoleon in 1803, many French and Spanish families left the suddenly U.S. territory, to resettle in Cuba. They were joined by thousands of poor Spanish settlers fleeing the eastern end of Hispaniola. Within the year, French …
Rita Luisa did not want to leave Cuba and missed her father terribly. Her mother and she stayed at the home of friends in Panama City, pleasant enough for an interim visit. But the time came for Consuelo, her mother, to go to Santiago de Veraguas to start teaching at …
1844: An uprising by black slaves, known as the Conspiracy of La Escalera (Conspiracy of the Ladder), is brutally suppressed.
1845: Antonio Maceo Grajales, nicknamed the Bronze Titan, is born in Santiago de Cuba. Second-in-command of the Cuban Army of Independence, he is one of the most noteworthy guerilla leaders in 19th century Latin America.
1845: Basques begin to be imported to work in the fields in place of slaves.
