You're listening to an airwave media podcast.

Ben Franklin's world is a production of the

Omaha Institute and is sponsored by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

Hello and happy new year.

Hello and happy new year. Welcome to episode 319 of Ben Franklin's world. The

podcast dedicated to helping you learn more about how the people and events of

our early American past have shaped the present day world we live in.

And I'm your host, Liz Kovart.

We all know the story of how in 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue

and found himself in the Caribbean.

Now one of the islands that Columbus stopped at during his first voyage across the Atlantic

was the alligator shaped island that sits right at the opening of the Gulf of Mexico

and approximately 90 miles from the Florida

shoreline. This island is, of course, the island of Cuba. Now what do we know about this

island that the Spanish described as the key to the Indies?

What kind of relationship in exchange did early Cuba have with British North America and the

early United States?

These are some of the questions that we'll be asking in this episode.

As Atter Ferrer, a professor of history and Latin American and Caribbean studies at New York University,

joins us to investigate the early history of Cuba with details from her book Cuba and American history.

Now during our investigation, Otto reveals what Cuba was like before the arrival of Christopher Columbus and the Spanish?

Why the Spanish and other European empires considered Cuba to be the key to the West Indies.

...