Hatuey

Hatuey was a Taino cacique, or chief, generally described as originating from the island of Hispaniola, who fled to eastern Cuba around 1511 to warn the Taino communities there of the violent Spanish conquest he had witnessed, after Spanish forces under Diego Velazquez launched an invasion of Cuba that year. He organized and led armed resistance against Velazquez's forces, using guerrilla tactics against an enemy with a large advantage in weapons and armor, but Spanish forces eventually captured him after tracking his band using war dogs and, according to colonial-era accounts, torture of captured followers for information. He was burned at the stake near the town of Yara in February 1512, and Spanish chroniclers of the period recorded that when a priest offered him conversion to Christianity and the promise of heaven before his execution, Hatuey asked whether Christians went to heaven too, and on being told yes, replied that he would rather go to hell than spend eternity with them. That defiant response, whatever its exact historical accuracy, became one of the most frequently cited episodes of early Indigenous resistance to Spanish colonization in the Caribbean, and Hatuey is honored today, particularly in Cuba, as an early national symbol of resistance, his name and image used for a well known Cuban beer brand and invoked repeatedly in later Cuban and wider Caribbean nationalist memory.