Bahia- Honda ( Cuba)

Title

Bahia- Honda ( Cuba)

Description

City view of Bahia Honda in Cuba

ca. 1850

Artist

Kunstanstalt Hildburghausen (1828-1874)

The German publishing company Bibliographisches Institut was founded 1826 in Gotha by Joseph Meyer, moved 1828 to Hildburghausen and 1874 to Leipzig. Its production over the years includes such well-known titles as Meyers Lexikon.

Historical Description

The name "Cuba" probably comes from the language of the Caribbean or Taíno. The words coa (= place) and bana (= big) mean something like "big place". Columbus wrote that he had landed in a place that the indigenous people called Cubao, Cuban or Cibao. These designations obviously referred to a mountain region near the place of landing in the east of Cuba. When it was first discovered, Columbus named the island Juana after Prince Don Juan. In 1515, his father Fernando II, King of Spain, ordered the name to be changed to Fernandina, because so far only one island in the Bahamas (today: Long Island) was named after him. Cuba and the Arawak people living there came under Spanish control in the first half of the 16th century. Within a few decades, the indigenous peoples were practically wiped out by violence and disease. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Spanish planters used tens of thousands of slaves to carry out the very labor-intensive cultivation of sugar cane, which were mainly imported from West Africa.