ABSTRACT
Although the Spanish conquest of Cuba changed life on the island drastically, it did not take place in an empty land, and it was not unopposed. Even under external European colonization the early indigenes were contributors to the culture.2 Before the arrival of the Spaniards, Cuba was populated by several American peoples, the immediate arrival before them being the Tainos, who had also established settlements in the other large islands of the Caribbean: Jamaica, Hispaniola (Haiti), and Puerto Rico (Borinquen).3 Soon after the arrival of Sir Diego Velázquez and his followers in Cuba, they were opposed by armed Tainos led by the cacique (chieftain) Hatuey, whose heroic death at the stake has become widely known through the writings of the Spanish missionary Father Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1560).4 When the Spanish conquerors reached the western part of Cuba they encountered two Spanish women and a Spanish boy who had been captured by the Tainos after their ship had become wrecked off the northern coast of the island. Because the Tainos had killed all the other survivors of that Spanish shipwreck, the Spaniards under Diego Velázquez called the bay where that massacre took place Bahía de Matanzas (Massacre Bay).5
