Portal:Cuba

(Redirected from P:CUBA)

Welcome to the Cuba Portal

Location of Cuba in the Caribbean
Republic of Cuba
República de Cuba (Spanish)

Cuba, officially the Republic of Cuba, is an island country, comprising the island of Cuba (largest island), Isla de la Juventud, and 4,195 islands, islets and cays surrounding the main island. It is located where the northern Caribbean Sea, Gulf of Mexico, and Atlantic Ocean meet. Cuba is located east of the Yucatán Peninsula (Mexico), south of both Florida and the Bahamas, west of Hispaniola (Haiti/Dominican Republic), and north of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands. Havana is the largest city and capital. Cuba is the third-most populous country in the Caribbean after Haiti and the Dominican Republic, with about 10 million inhabitants. It is the largest country in the Caribbean by area.

Cuba is a socialist state, in which the role of the Communist Party is enshrined in the Constitution. Cuba has an authoritarian government where political opposition is not permitted. Censorship is extensive and independent journalism is repressed; Reporters Without Borders has characterized Cuba as one of the worst countries for press freedom. Culturally, Cuba is considered part of Latin America. It is a multiethnic country whose people, culture and customs derive from diverse origins, including the Taíno Ciboney peoples, the long period of Spanish colonialism, the introduction of enslaved Africans and a close relationship with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. (Full article...)

Entrance to tunnel from East Havana

Havana Tunnel is a route under the Havana Bay, built by the French company Societé de Grand Travaux de Marseille between 1957 and 1958. The president of the Republic Fulgencio Batista planned to expand the city to Habana del Este with a new suburb, and a new connection between Havana Vieja and the east side across Havana Bay was required.

The tunnel extends from the Paseo de Prado, is 733 m long and 12 m below ground level. It takes a driver 45 seconds traveling at a speed of 60 km/h to traverse the tunnel. In the 1970s the new suburb of Alamar in East Havana was built with the aid of the former Soviet Union. The new suburb was composed of Soviet-style concrete buildings, with no city center or character. (Full article...)
List of selected articles

General images

The following are images from various Cuba-related articles on Wikipedia.

Did you know (auto-generated)

  • ... that the 1919 foxtrot song "I'll See You in C-U-B-A" was an example of Cuba being perceived as "America's playground"?
  • ... that after his release from a hospital for the criminally insane, Richard Dixon burgled $16 from a credit union and hijacked a jet to Cuba?
  • ... that before his Major League Baseball career, Leo Posada represented Cuba internationally in cycling?
  • ... that José Ramón Balaguer fought as a soldier-medic for Fidel Castro's rebel army before becoming Cuba's minister of public health?
  • ... that Brooklyn Nine-Nine actress Melissa Fumero is the daughter of Cubans who fled to the U.S. as teenagers?
  • ... that Rudi Kappel, co-founder of the first airline of Suriname, was arrested both on entering and leaving Santiago de Cuba?

Recognized content - show another

Entries here consist of Good and Featured articles, which meet a core set of high editorial standards.

In December 1971, the freighters Leyla Express and Johnny Express were seized by Cuban gunboats. The Leyla Express was stopped in international waters off the Cuban coast on December 5; the Johnny Express was intercepted by gunboats near the island of Little Inagua in the Bahamas ten days later. Some of the crew of the Johnny Express, including the captain, were injured when the gunboats fired on their vessel. The freighters both carried Panamanian flags of convenience, but belonged to the Bahama Lines corporation, based in Miami. The company was run by four brothers, Cuban exiles who had previously been involved in activities directed against the Cuban government of Fidel Castro. Cuba stated that both vessels were being used by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to transport weapons, explosives, and personnel to Cuba, and described the vessels as being engaged in piracy. Cuba had suspected the involvement of one of Bahama Lines's ships in shelling the Cuban village of Samá, on the northern coast of Oriente Province, a few months previously; several civilians had died in the attack. The US government of Richard Nixon and the Bahama Lines denied the accusations.

Cuba released the crew of both ships to Panamanian custody, but announced that José Villa, the captain of the Johnny Express, had confessed to being an agent of the CIA, and would face trial. The US asked the Panamanian government of Omar Torrijos to negotiate his release. Rómulo Escobar Bethancourt and Manuel Noriega traveled to Cuba, where they negotiated Villa's release into Panamanian custody, in return for which criminal charges were brought against Villa in Panama, though he was released without being convicted. The success of the negotiations undertaken by Noriega were later used by him to bargain with the US government. As a consequence of the incident, the US ordered all its naval and air forces in the region to go to the aid of any ships coming under attack from Cuban vessels. A Panamanian mission which investigated the incident concluded, based on the ships' logs, that the vessels had in fact brought insurgent forces to Cuban territory, and that the Cuban government's accusations on that count were accurate. (Full article...)

Selected biography - show another

Enrique González Castillo (1890 – January 1, 1957), nicknamed La Pulga (The Flea), was a Cuban singer-songwriter from Santiago de Cuba. His two most famous works are the boleros "Injusta duda" and "Lupina", which have been recorded by artists such as Arsenio Rodríguez and Compay Segundo, respectively. The latter was written for danzonete singer Pablo Quevedo in 1934. His repertoire included boleros, canciones, guarachas and guajiras written by himself. The height of his career took place in the 1930s and '40s in Havana, where he was the guitarist for Benny Moré before he joined Conjunto Matamoros to tour Mexico. In addition, he was part of several other vocal groups, collaborating with famous guarachero Ñico Saquito.

In March 2014, Cuban trova musicians paid homage to González in his hometown of Santiago. (Full article...)
List of selected biographies

Selected picture

View of Havana from hotel Sevilla
View of Havana from hotel Sevilla
Credit: Anatoly Terentiev, 29 December 2002.
View of Havana from hotel Sevilla.

More did you know - show different entries

  • ...that the Cauto River is the longest river in Cuba at 213 miles?
More did you know... New articles...

Topics

Categories

Category puzzle
Category puzzle
Select [►] to view subcategories

Quote of the day

Narrator Raquel Revuelta in the 1964 film I am Cuba.

Things you can do

Wikipedia's maxim is that anyone can edit. If you are interested in Cuba and have useful information that would form a new article or would enhance an existing article, please feel free to take part. Here are some tasks you can do to help with WikiProject Cuba:

WikiProjects

Recognized content

Extended content

Good articles

Associated Wikimedia

The following Wikimedia Foundation sister projects provide more on this subject:

More portals