Cuba

Cuba was Spain's first major colony in the New World, established in 1511, and it was the last major colony Spain relinquished 400 years later, after the Spanish-American War of 1898. Many Cuba experts see Spain's long, dogged attachment to the Caribbean island as one reason Cuba acquired what might be called an inflated sense of its own importance. But that bold national self-image has helped Cubans, at home or in exile, to keep their country in the world's eye for the past half century—and it has roused Fidel Castro, for better or worse, to defy the American superpower on Cuba's doorstep.

Cuba in the 16th century was actually a Spanish launch site for the conquest of far more valuable prizes like Mexico. But Cuba's main harbor, the capital city of Havana, remained a prime target for pirates preying on gold- and silver-laden Spanish galleons heading back to Europe. When indigenous tribes like the Taino all but died off from European diseases, African slaves—who would form the basis of Cuba's rich culture—were brought in to work the prodigious sugar cane plantations. Cuba became so prosperous that it was nicknamed the Pearl of the Antilles. The subsequent struggles between Spain and European powers like Britain for possession of Cuba (U.S. southerners even eyed it as a potential new slave state) only strengthened the island's feeling that it was a geopolitical pivot.

Spain was able to hold on to Cuba—and it did so with an especially iron fist in the 19th century as its other Latin American holdings, from Mexico to Argentina, broke away and became independent republics. Cuba's own independence movement, led by heroes like author-turned-insurgent Jose Martí—whose book Nuestra America (Our America) is one of the most powerful treatises on Latin American identity eventually weakened Madrid's grip.

The U.S. broke it for good during the Spanish-American War—only to impose its own quasi-imperialist control over Cuba with intermittent military occupations and the Platt Amendment, a 1902 treaty that essentially made Cuba a Yanqui protectorate until the 1930s. U.S. investor control of key industries like sugar and railroads kindled a resentment among many Cubans that was in full flame by the time Castro burst onto the scene in the 1950s.

Ultimately it was a right-wing Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista, who did more than the gringos to usher in Castro's left-wing revolution. A one-time sergeant who rose to head the army, Batista overthrew Cuba's feeble democracy in a 1952 coup. He brutally suppressed his opposition and lavishly enriched himself while giving U.S. corporations (and the Mafia) even more free rein over his country. Glittering casinos and nightclubs made Havana one of the hemisphere's most glamorous destinations—and the center of a golden age of Cuban culture led by mambo stars like Benny More and Celia Cruz. Still, the corruption, oppression and poverty pervading it all were unsustainable.

In 1953 Castro, a 26-year-old Havana lawyer, led an abortive assault on the Moncada military barracks. He was captured and sentenced to 15 years in prison; at his trial he insisted, "History will absolve me." Batista released him in 1955, and Castro went into exile in Mexico. There, he assembled and trained other banished Cubans, as well as an Argentine drifter named Che Guevara. In 1956 they landed on Cuba's southern coast in a small, rickety boat called Granma to begin an armed insurgency.

Castro's army barely made it to dry land before being routed by Batista's troops. But remarkably, as they dug into Cuba's rugged sierras, their forces grew and gained national and international support (thanks largely to an interview Castro gave to New York Times journalist Herbert Matthews). As the middle class abandoned Batista, Havana fell at the end of 1958. Batista fled, and Castro's Cuban Revolution marched in shortly after New Year's Day, 1959.

The rest is Cold War history—including a confrontation that almost set off a nuclear conflagration. Castro made the poor a top priority, giving them the education and healthcare they'd always been denied. Prodded by communist hardliners like Guevara and Castro's brother Raśl, however, he also turned Cuba into a totalitarian state that seized private property and jailed or executed "counterrevolutionaries."

Thousands of Cubans fled to exile in Miami. After the CIA tried to dislodge Castro with the disastrous, exile-led Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961—and when in 1962 the U.S. imposed an economic embargo on the island—Castro turned to the Soviet Union to keep his revolution viable. In October of that year he let the Russians place nuclear warheads inside Cuba, which led to the frightening diplomatic showdown known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Russians acceded to President Kennedy's demands to remove the missiles—but not before Castro, according to historical documents, urged Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to nuke the U.S.

Castro has outlasted 10 U.S. Presidents and is still widely hailed as a fiery symbol of anti-yanqui defiance —but at a high cost to Cuba's economy and human rights. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s, many Cubans nearly starved, forcing Castro to open industries like tourism to private foreign investment in order to prop up his regime. Washington, ever mindful of the voting power of the Cuban exiles in Florida, maintains the embargo, especially since Castro has kept political freedoms locked up. In 2003, after dissident leader Oswaldo Payá conducted a popular petition drive for a referendum on communist rule, Castro angrily jailed scores of dissidents across the island.

Today, the octogenarian Castro is said to be suffering from stomach cancer, though the government denies it. In July 2006, his frail health forced him to hand provisional power to his younger brother Raul, who heads the hard-line military but may move Cuba to a more China-style hybrid of communism and capitalism. In the 21st century, the rule of the Castros—and the passionate efforts of Cuban exiles to oust them—have outlasted more than U.S. Presidents. Sadly, they've outlasted Cuba's importance in world affairs.

—Tim Padgett/Miami