History and geography determine the present, not just what happened and what is there, but even more so how it is remembered and taught. History is written by the victors, and the perception of the land and Man’s relation to it also has a strong subjective component, one perhaps even more influential than the actual reality we inherit. No matter how conscientious the historian, what he interprets and documents from the fragments of evidence he examines owes at least as much to what he already thinks as to what actually occurred in some idealized past it may have little resemblance to. These comments outline my home state’s past as I envision it, and as it was taught to me. If you want to know the actual truth (whatever that is) you can look it up. Good luck. It may differ from what I write here, but I write this from memory, not scholarship.

When the 16th century Spanish explorers first started exploring coastal Florida they found an inhospitable land of oppressive heat, ferocious mosquitoes and tropical disease with a soil and climate poorly suited for their agricultural technology. It also contained no gold, which I suspect was their major motivation to come here.

But they did find many thriving native cultures here, mostly hugging the coasts, that exploited the phenomenal biological richness and diversity of the mangrove swamps, bays and lagoons that bordered the interior. What was in short supply was fresh water. The geology and flat terrain ensured that salt water marshes and the tides made drinking water scarce near the sea in spite of the precipitation, and although it was plentiful inland, hiking into the bush to locate it was dangerous and exhausting. The natives knew where to find it, there is abundant archaeological evidence of the presence of early man throughout the state, but the Spanish were reluctant to wander far from their anchored galleons, and the coast is not hospitable to deep-draft ships. There were some skirmishes with the aborigines, but for the most part, the native populations were wiped out by European diseases, not cold steel and gunpowder.

Evidence of that time can still be found today in place names, and in the words we use for the wildlife. “Alligator” is a corruption of the Spanish “el lagarto”, “the lizard”. The marine landforms still maintain many of the their Spanish names, “Boca” (literally “mouth”) for “Pass”, “Estero” for “Sound”, and “Cayo” for “Key” (an island with no source of fresh water). “Santa Ysabel” became Anglicized to “Sanibel”, and “Cayo Hueso” (“Bone Key”, due to the Indian burial ground they found there) morphed to “Key West”. Eventually, the Spanish settled along the northern part of the peninsula, what we now call the Panhandle, along the borders of present-day Alabama and Georgia, where the climate was more to their liking. The Dons built a string of missions west to the Gulf of Mexico, anchored at the Atlantic end by the magnificent fortress at St. Augustine. It is the only architectural artifact of the Spanish presence still intact, and the city surrounding it is the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in the United States.

Eventually the Spanish left, the colony had no economic success, and it was constantly harassed by pirates from the sea and aggressive English colonists from the North. Spain ceded their holdings in Florida to the English and left, leaving little but memories to mark their centuries-long presence. Throughout much of the 18th century, Florida was pretty much abandoned by the white man and it became a refuge for displaced Indians and fugitive slaves from the new expansionist English speaking nation to the north. These merged to become the present Native American populations of the State, the original red inhabitants now being pretty much extinct. You can even say the Seminoles were illegal immigrants. This used to be Spanish land.

Eventually, the United States began to exert its influence on Florida, fighting a series of inconclusive (and often disastrous) wars with the Seminoles. The Americans were outraged that the Indians to their south were still offering refuge to runaway slaves and built an archipelago of forts throughout the State. A glance at any modern map will show you where they were. The one in Tampa was called Fort Brooke. It no longer exists as a place name, but Fort Myers, Fort Pierce, Fort Lauderdale, Fort Drum and many others still do. The Seminoles were never conquered, and never signed a treaty with the US Government. Perhaps this is why they prosper to this day.

Not much happened in Florida during the 19th century. After the Seminole Wars, the State joined the Union, and then the Confederacy, but it remained sparsely populated.. A few Civil War engagements were fought there, but none of any strategic importance. Tampa became a base for blockade runners, smugglers and pirates, but it was on the map to stay. Key West also became a hub for piracy, the good residents of the town earned their living from marine salvage, taking advantage of the many wrecks occuring when ships navigated the treacherous Hawke Channel between the Gulf Stream and the barrier reefs offshore of the Florida Keys. If any of the crews survived the shipwrecks, they were shot so the cargoes could be salvaged without the lawful owners claiming any of the profits. When the Navy erected a series of lighthouses to guide shipping through the Florida Straits, the locals started sabotaging them and lighting bonfires on the beach to guide ships to their doom. Eventually, the Navy had to occupy the town in order to put a stop to it. The Naval facility is still there. Florida’s waters are ideal for maritime crime. Only a few years ago the entire town of Everglades City, including the local police, were arrested one night in order to put an end to a massive marijuana smuggling operation based there.

Jules Verne, recognizing the optimal geodynamical location of Florida for the location of an American space port, set the action of “From the Earth to the Moon” in Tampa, although he took the artistic liberty of moving the town to the Atlantic Coast. It is clear from even a cursory reading of the book that Monsieur Verne never actually traveled there.

During most of the last half of the 19th century, Florida’s neighbor to the South, Cuba, was wracked by a series of brutal wars as the Cubans sought independence from Spain. The Spanish cigar making industry based there, seeking to avoid the troubles, moved to Key West, and later, Tampa. After the Revolution, the new Cuban government legalized trade unions, and the cigar factories stayed in the USA, which offered a more business-friendly environment to the Spanish tobacco tycoons. This is when my grandparents moved to America. Both my grandfathers were educated men who earned their living by reading aloud to the cigar workers while they hand-rolled “the finest tobacco in the world”.

But Key West did not have a deep water port, and there was no railroad connecting it to the cigar markets on the mainland, so the industry soon settled in Tampa, where both port and rail facilities suitable for the industry existed (and a local police establishment eager to clamp down on Union activity was bribable and ready to do its bidding). The railroad had been built by Henry Plant to bring visitors to his spectacular resort hotel in Tampa. This grotesque architecural monstrosity still exists, by the way, it is now the University of Tampa. If you’re ever in town, its worth a visit. Its pseudo-Moorish minarets may be ugly, but it is totally unique, and the interior appointments and furnishings of the buildings were the ultimate in 19th century luxury, and still impressive today. The cigar industry brought thousands of skilled Cuban cigar makers, and all their associated supporting trades to Ybor City, the Spanish Quarter of Tampa. At the height of the manufactory, there were over a hundred cigar factories in Tampa, each employing several hundred highly skilled (and very well paid, by the standards of their day) workers. The city also became a hotbed of revolutionary and anarchist activity, as the Cuban patriot leader Marti and others came there frequently to make speeches and raise money for arms for the liberation of the homeland. When America entered the war, US Rough Riders rode the rail to Tampa, and hopped on ships there to fight on the island. It is said Teddy Roosevelt himself got laid in the El Pasaje bordello in Ybor City. The building still stands.

Tampa had an enormous Cuban colony, (it was considered a suburb of Havana), that survived the Depression, the strikes, and the introduction of cigar rolling machinery in the Thirties that finally put an end to the Cigar Culture. My parents were born and spent their youth there, acculturated as Americans, and even as a child, I was exposed to the stories from the old timers who had come to America after the turn of the 20th century. I lived in this environment, an urban Cuban world, (I was brought up in the Ponce de Leon Federal Housing Project) until at age 12 I moved to Brandon, a small town on the outskirts of the city.

Brandon back then was rural Florida, the sticks. Today, it is a yuppified bedroom suburb of the city, but I spent my high school years brought up in the heart of Cracker country. “Cracker”, by the way, is not a term of opprobium. The native Floridians called themselves Crackers, a term reputedly from the pioneer days, when Florida boys were considered master mule team drivers who were unsurpassed in the use of the bullwhip. Since I was a native Floridian, I guess I was technically a Cracker myself, although I was to learn the hard way that you were never really accepted into that culture, even if you were born into it like my parents were, even if you were second generation like I was.

But the Spanish kept on coming. In the 1960s, the Cuban upper classes moved en masse to Miami, seeking to escape the brutal Communist dictatorship that established itself on the island in 1959. Within a few years, they were followed by the middle and working classes as well. The black workers that had traditionally been the labor force behind Florida agriculture moved to the big ciies of the American North, and were soon replaced by migrant Mexican and Central American farm workers. Columbians moved to Florida to escape the narco wars, and Venezuelans moved here to escape Hugo Chavez. Today, its the Puerto Ricans who are invading the state to escape the crime wave and economic troubles of that island. Everywhere I go in Florida now I hear Spanish spoken, although it is often in an accent foreign to my native Havana coastal dialect. Many of the new arrivals have had children here, and many of them speak only English, and their English has a peculiar accent to it, not a Spanish one, but something new and different but nonetheless distinct.. And of course, many people from up north have settled in Florida, midwesterners, urban northeast blacks, Jewish folks, Canadians, New Yorkers, you name it. But the Crackers, as a culture, are rapidly disappearing. There are still pockets of them in the sparsely populated interior of the state, but in another generation they will be gone–not as a race, but as a culture and a way of life.

After the extinction of the Arawak and other indigenous tribes, Florida has always been a Spanish land. It was briefly occupied by Anglo invaders from the North, but it is now quickly returning to its normal condition.