Latin America

Cuba sits about 90 miles from Key West, and for most of the 1800s Americans looked at it the way a neighbor looks at a house next door. They traded with it, argued about it, and more than once talked about buying it. When war finally came in 1898, the camera was there. For 4 centuries Cuba was a Spanish colony, and one of the richest in the world, thanks to sugar. Plantations worked by enslaved people made fortunes for planters and merchants, and slavery was not abolished on the island until 1886. Havana grew into a grand port city with stone forts, wide promenades and churches that still stand.

Cubans fought Spain for independence in a long war from 1868 to 1878 and again from 1895. American newspapers covered the second rising heavily, and public feeling ran high. In February 1898, the battleship USS Maine exploded in Havana harbor and sank, killing most of her crew. The cause is still argued, but the country went to war with Spain within weeks.

The war was short. Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders became famous for the fighting near Santiago in July 1898, and Spain gave up the island by the end of the year. The United States occupied Cuba until 1902, and American influence stayed strong for decades after.

That is why so many pictures of Cuba exist in American archives. War photographers covered 1898, and the wreck of the Maine sat in the harbor for years as a sight for visitors. After the war came the tourist photographers and the postcard makers. Havana's harbor and Morro Castle, the Prado, the cathedral, sugar mills, tobacco fields and cigar factories all turn up again and again.

Look for the Morro Castle lighthouse at the mouth of Havana harbor. It appears in hundreds of pictures from every decade, and it makes a handy marker for where the photographer stood. Look too at the street scenes, where Spanish colonial buildings sit beside electric streetcars and American advertising.