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Sierra Maestra
The Sierra Maestra is a mountain range that runs westward across the south of the old Oriente Province in southeast Cuba, rising abruptly from the coast. The range falls mainly within the Santiago de Cuba and in Granma Provinces. Some view it as a series of connecting ranges (Vela, Santa Catalina, Quemado Grande, Daña Mariana), which join with others to the west. At 1,974 m (6,476 ft), Pico Turquino is the range's – and the country's – highest point. The area is rich in minerals, especially copper, manganese, chromium, and iron. History The Sierra Maestra has a long history of guerrilla warfare, starting with the resistance of the Taínos under Guamá (died 1532), the Cimarrón Neo-Taíno nations escaped slave cultures, the Ten Years' War (1868–1878) and the Cuban War of Independence (1895–1898), and various minor conflicts such as the Race War of 1912, and the uprisings of Antonio Guiteras (died 1935) against Gerardo Machado (President of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cuba
Cuba, officially the Republic of Cuba, is an island country, comprising the island of Cuba (largest island), Isla de la Juventud, and List of islands of Cuba, 4,195 islands, islets and cays surrounding the main island. It is located where the northern Caribbean Sea, Gulf of Mexico, and Atlantic Ocean meet. Cuba is located east of the Yucatán Peninsula (Mexico), south of both Florida and the Bahamas, west of Hispaniola (Haiti/Dominican Republic), and north of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands. Havana is the largest city and capital. Cuba is the List of countries and dependencies by population, third-most populous country in the Caribbean after Haiti and the Dominican Republic, with about 10 million inhabitants. It is the largest country in the Caribbean by area. The territory that is now Cuba was inhabited as early as the 4th millennium BC, with the Guanahatabey and Taino, Taíno peoples inhabiting the area at the time of Spanish colonization of the Americas, Spanish colonization ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Partido Independiente De Color
The (PIC) was a Cuban political party composed almost entirely of African former slaves. It was founded in 1908 by African veterans of the Cuban War of Independence. In 1912, the PIC led a revolt in the eastern province of Oriente. The revolt was crushed and the party disbanded. It is believed Esteban Montejo, subject of Miguel Barnet's "Biografía de un cimarrón," was a member of this party, or had close associates who were. Background The Cuban War of Independence was a conflict between Cuban Revolutionaries and Spain that lasted from 1895 to 1898. The United States intervened in 1898 on the side of the Cuban revolutionaries as a part of the Spanish–American War. At the end of the war, Cuba became a US protectorate. During the war, Spain frequently painted the conflict as a "race war" and referred to Cuban revolutionary troops as "blacks". A majority of the troops in the Cuban independence army were black and mixed-race, while the majority of the senior officers in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bicknell's Thrush
Bicknell's thrush (''Catharus bicknelli'') is a medium-sized thrush, at and . One of North America's rarest and most localized songbirds, it breeds on coniferous mountain tops and disturbed habitats of northeastern North America. While very similar in appearance and vocalization to the gray-cheeked thrush (''Catharus minimus''), the two species, with two completely different breeding ranges, differ slightly in their morphology and vocalizations. It was named after Eugene Bicknell, an American amateur ornithologist, who made the first scientific discovery of the species on Slide Mountain in the Catskills in the late 19th century. John Burroughs, in his essay, "The Heart of the Southern Catskills" (1886), writes effusively about the voice of Bicknell's thrush heard near the summit on his climbs of Slide Mountain, and how on his stays on Slide saw them nowhere else but "about the summit", and saw no other thrush but Bicknell's. Description Bicknell's thrush is just slightly smal ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bird Migration
Bird migration is a seasonal movement of birds between breeding and wintering grounds that occurs twice a year. It is typically from north to south or from south to north. Animal migration, Migration is inherently risky, due to predation and mortality. The Arctic tern holds the long-distance migration record for birds, travelling between Arctic breeding grounds and the Antarctic each year. Some species of Procellariiformes, tubenoses, such as albatrosses, circle the Earth, flying over the southern oceans, while others such as Manx shearwaters migrate between their northern breeding grounds and the southern ocean. Shorter migrations are common, while longer ones are not. The shorter migrations include altitudinal migrations on mountains, including the Andes and Himalayas. The timing of migration seems to be controlled primarily by changes in day length. Migrating birds navigate using celestial cues from the Sun and stars, the Earth's magnetic field, and mental maps. Histor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Extinction
Extinction is the termination of an organism by the death of its Endling, last member. A taxon may become Functional extinction, functionally extinct before the death of its last member if it loses the capacity to Reproduction, reproduce and recover. As a species' potential Range (biology), range may be very large, determining this moment is difficult, and is usually done retrospectively. This difficulty leads to phenomena such as Lazarus taxon, Lazarus taxa, where a species presumed extinct abruptly "reappears" (typically in the Fossil, fossil record) after a period of apparent absence. Over five billion species are estimated to have died out. It is estimated that there are currently around 8.7 million species of eukaryotes globally, possibly many times more if microorganisms are included. Notable extinct animal species include Dinosaur, non-avian dinosaurs, Machairodontinae, saber-toothed cats, and mammoths. Through evolution, species arise through the process of specia ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ivory-billed Woodpecker
The ivory-billed woodpecker (''Campephilus principalis'') is a woodpecker native to the Southern United States and Cuba. Habitat destruction and hunting have reduced populations so severely that the last universally accepted sighting in the United States was in 1944, and the last universally accepted sighting in Cuba was in 1987. The ivory-bill is the largest woodpecker in the United States, and one of the largest in the world. Naturalist John James Audubon described it as the "Great chieftain of the woodpecker tribe". In adults, the bill is ivory in color, hence the species' common name, and the plumage is deep black and white, with a red crest in males. The bird was commonly found in bottomland hardwood forests, including dense swampland, and in temperate coniferous forests. Its diet consists of large beetle larvae, particularly wood-boring Cerambycidae beetles, supplemented by vegetable matter, including southern magnolia, pecans, acorns, hickory nuts, wild grapes, and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cuban Ivory-billed Woodpecker
The Cuban ivory-billed woodpecker () (''Campephilus principalis bairdii'') is a subspecies of the ivory-billed woodpecker native to Cuba. Originally classified as a separate species, recent research has indicated that ''C. p. bairdii'' may, in fact, be sufficiently distinct from the nominate subspecies to once again be regarded as a species in its own right. There have been no confirmed sightings of the Cuban ivory-billed woodpecker since 1987. It is believed to have gone extinct around 1990, but it is currently evaluated by the IUCN as critically endangered, as the survival of small populations is considered a remote possibility and due to unconfirmed reports. However, much like its mainland counterpart, these sightings and reports are widely disputed and polemic. Taxonomy and appearance ''C. p. bairdii'' was originally designated as a separate species (''C. bairdii'') by John Cassin, based on suggestions by Spencer Fullerton Baird. Cassin described it as: Much resembling '' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Escopeteros
During the Cuban revolution, escopeteros were essential scouts and pickets from the Sierra Maestra and other mountain ranges to the plains. The "escopeteros" were responsible for semi-continuously holding terrain against smaller sized Batista patrols. The escopeteros provided first alerts, communications, protected supply routes, provided essential intelligence and often captured weapons which were sent up to the mainline Castro forces in the high mountains. Raúl Castro's mission to open a second front was in reality a mission to control an area already in possession of independent (“por la libre”) escopeteros. It can be argued that Ernesto "Che" Guevara's overseas adventures failed at least in part because of the lack of equivalent escopetero support. In the series of articles written by the staff of Escambray (circa 1988 to 2007, Che entre nosotros. Supplement to Escambray) the critical role of escopeteros is repeatedly mentioned. Yet the Argentine guerrilla leader nev ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
26th Of July Movement
The 26 July Movement (; M-26-7) was a Cuban vanguard revolutionary organization and later a political party led by Fidel Castro. The movement's name commemorates the failed 1953 attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba, part of an attempt to overthrow the dictator Fulgencio Batista. M-26-7 is considered the leading organization of the Cuban Revolution. At the end of 1956, Castro established a guerrilla base in the Sierra Maestra. This base defeated the troops of Batista on 31 December 1958, setting into motion the Cuban Revolution and installing a government led by Manuel Urrutia Lleó. The Movement fought the Batista regime on both rural and urban fronts. The movement's main objectives were distribution of land to peasants, nationalization of public services, industrialization, honest elections, and large-scale education reform. In July 1961, the 26th of July Movement was one of the parties that integrated into the Integrated Revolutionary Organization (ORI) as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Moncada Barracks
The Moncada Barracks were military barracks in Santiago de Cuba, Cuba named after General Guillermo Moncada, a hero of the Cuban War of Independence. On 26 July 1953, the barracks was the site of an armed attack by a small group of revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro. That day a simultaneous attack was carried out on the Carlos M. de Cespedes Barracks in Bayamo directed by Raúl Martínez Ararás by order of Castro. The attack failed and the surviving revolutionaries were imprisoned. This armed attack is widely accepted as the beginning of the Cuban Revolution. The date on which the attack took place, 26 July, was adopted by Castro as the name for his revolutionary movement, Movimiento 26 Julio (abbreviated as M-26-7), which eventually toppled the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista on 1 January 1959. Preparation Almost all of Fidel Castro's followers were Partido Ortodoxo Youth rank and file of the lower middle class and working class. Of the 137 insurgents whose ages are kn ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mexico
Mexico, officially the United Mexican States, is a country in North America. It is the northernmost country in Latin America, and borders the United States to the north, and Guatemala and Belize to the southeast; while having maritime boundary, maritime boundaries with the Pacific Ocean to the west, the Caribbean Sea to the southeast, and the Gulf of Mexico to the east. Mexico covers 1,972,550 km2 (761,610 sq mi), and is the List of countries by area, thirteenth-largest country in the world by land area. With a population exceeding 130 million, Mexico is the List of countries by population, tenth-most populous country in the world and is home to the Hispanophone#Countries, largest number of native Spanish speakers. Mexico City is the capital and List of cities in Mexico, largest city, which ranks among the List of cities by population, most populous metropolitan areas in the world. Human presence in Mexico dates back to at least 8,000 BC. Mesoamerica, considered a cradle ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fidel Castro
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz (13 August 1926 – 25 November 2016) was a Cuban politician and revolutionary who was the leader of Cuba from 1959 to 2008, serving as the prime minister of Cuba from 1959 to 1976 and President of Cuba, president from 1976 to 2008. Ideologically a Marxist–Leninist and Cuban nationalist, he also served as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba, first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from 1965 until 2011. Under his administration, Cuba became a One-party state, one-party communist state; industry and business were nationalized, and socialist reforms were implemented throughout society. Born in Birán, the son of a wealthy Spanish farmer, Castro adopted leftist and anti-imperialist ideas while studying law at the University of Havana. After participating in rebellions against right-wing governments in the Dominican Republic#Trujillo Era (1930–61), Dominican Republic and La Violencia, Colombia, he planned the overthrow of Cuban ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
