Natural Traditional Medicine (NTM) in Cuba was practiced more than 1000 years ago by the Taino Indians, the indigenous people of Cuba who descended from the Arawaks, the people that had migrated to the island from the Greater Antilles in the 9th century. The Taino were the first to introduce agriculture to Cuba and the first peoples in the Western Hemisphere to be called “Indians”.
The Taino had devised an extensive pharmacopeia from nature and prospered for centuries before European contact. In fact, Cuba, the largest island of the Antilles, was originally divided into 29 individual Taino chiefdoms.
Havana, the name of the capitol city of Cuba, is actually derived from the Taino language. One theory is that the word Havana/Habana originates from the name of the Taino cacique (native chief) called Habaguanex, who controlled the area where the village was first settled.
With the arrival of Spanish colonizers, torture, enslavement and executions of the Taino began en masse. Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican friar who accompanied the Spanish completed a narrative in 1542 entitled, “Brief Account of The Destruction of the Indies.” Many Taino also died of disease.
In 1565, the Taino were officially declared extinct when a census showed just 200 Indians living on Hispaniola, now the Dominican Republic. But recently, historians and DNA testing have confirmed that a genocide was carried out on paper. “Paper genocide” is considered the act of making a people disappear on paper. By reclassifying race in records, a government can cause ancestry to be suppressed. For instance, in the 1787 census of Puerto Rico there were 2300 enumerated Indians, but none were listed on the following census of 1802.
In 2018 a DNA study found that 61% of all Puerto Ricans and roughly a third of Cubans and Dominicans have Native American (Taino) mitochondrial DNA.
A more detailed analysis of the DNA data can be found here:
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