Cuba

Just over ninety miles off the coast of Florida, the largest island of the Caribbean, Cuba is also one of the few remaining socialist states governed by communism, and the remnants of the Cold War between East and West still linger in the shadows of its tropical warmth.
Cuba was a Spanish colony and possession until the end of the Spanish-American war, when it was ceded to the United States in the Treaty of Paris in 1898. Cuba declared independence a few years thereafter, followed by political upheavals and corruption and totalitarian rule by Fulgencio Batista. He was in turn ousted by a Communist revolution led by Fidel Castro, who was head of the new socialist Cuban state for almost fifty years.

THE COMMUNIST CONNECTION

Communist Cuba forged strong ties with the Soviet Union early on, and came to rely upon Soviet support and subsidies, while at the same time supporting communist and anti-imperialist revolution around the world. The Soviets used Cuba as a staging-ground close to the United States, exemplified by the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, a tense diplomatic stand-off concerning the placement of Soviet nuclear weapons on Cuban soil, within striking distance of the United States. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev expected U.S. President Kennedy to capitulate, but, instead, his administration held fast to a military blockade of Cuba and managed to negotiate an agreement to dismantle the missile sites. Earth-Prime heroes know of at least one alternate Earth where the Crisis led to an all-out nuclear war between the two powers, resulting in a radioactive wasteland inhabited by mutants and a handful of surviving humans.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba has sought alliance with communist China, with mixed success. Meanwhile, some Russian expatriates and Soviet-era secrets and technology have found their way to Havana and, from there, to the international black market.

GUANTANAMO BAY

On the southwestern shore of Cuba sits Guantanamo Bay, the site of a U.S. Naval Base and military detention center.
Treaties in 1903 and 1934 allowed for the establishment of a permanent U.S. military base. The current government of Cuba says the U.S. base is illegal, and does not recognize the United States’ right to the base, but the matter remains unresolved and the United States continues to maintain the base and a military presence in Cuba.
Since 2002, Guantanamo Bay has been the site of a military detention camp for detainees classified as enemy combatants following the 2001 terrorist attack on New York City and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, in spite of questions of U.S. and international law concerning it. Rumors claim the detention camp is a front for “black ops” government experimentation.

MEDICAL TOURISM

One of Cuba’s newest “industries” is a thriving “medical tourism” business, where foreigners visit the country looking for cut-rate medical procedures (and a pleasant beach to recuperate on).
In Cuba, this has gone well beyond just plastic surgery and routine operations. With the nation’s legacy of Communist super-science, Cuba is fast becoming a site of illegal medical experimentation and procedures of all kinds. Criminals, thrill-seekers, and wealthy clients seek out augmentations of the type provided by the Power House, from biochemical and gene-splicing to cyborg implants. Indeed, the Power-House has moved some of their labs and “clinics” off-shore.
The most recent developments in “black market augmentations” have been an influx of experimental technologies and techniques from China (using Cuba as a testing-ground for some dubious enhancements) as well as alien technology and genetics smuggled into the Caribbean from Star Island and refugees from the shattered Lor Republic, as well as discoveries in and near Emerald City. International entanglements make it difficult for foreign governments to prove that illegal clinics are operating on Cuban soil, much less shut them down.

TREASURE ISLAND

Isla de la Juventud (the “Isle of Youth”) is the second largest Cuban island, located south of the western end of Cuba itself. Formerly known as both the “Isle of the Pines” and “Treasure Island,” it was the basis of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel of the same name and for the pirates of Neverland in Peter Pan (featuring a combination of pirates, natives with canoes, and crocodiles). Although the island’s pirate days are long since past, literary and mythic associations carry some weight on Earth-Prime, and Captain Blood’s ghost-ship, the Black Plunder, has been active here (see Tortuga) and the young heroes of the Next-Gen once encountered analogues of the characters from Peter Pan there, conjured up by the interdimensional imp Quirk.

SANTERIA

Although Cuba is officially an atheist nation, it still has a substantial religious population. More than half of its people identify as Roman Catholic (from the nation’s Spanish heritage), and the Afro-Caribbean mystical tradition of Santería is alive and well here. Santeros worship and serve the Orishas, powerful spirits much like the loa of Voodoo, and some have mystical powers or serve as hosts or conduits for the power of the Orishas.

GUANAJATABEY

The indigenous inhabitants of Cuba when Columbus arrived in the New World were a Ciboney people who called themselves Guanajatabey, the only surviving word from their language. Little is known of them: they were likely pre-agricultural cave dwellers, displaced and largely wiped out by the arrival of Europeans and the redistribution of populations on the islands. Given that they were related to the Taíno peoples of the Caribbean, it’s possible the Guanajatabey practiced some type of mysticism, and left behind some artifacts and remnants of ancient rituals.