guaycures

Updated: June 29, 2025

The Guaycures were a peacefully disposed race, hospitable, indolent, fond of dancing and singing, by means of which they transmitted their legends from generation to generation. They fell an easy prey to the Spaniards. Velasquez conquered Cuba without the loss of a man.

R. A. (Rudolph Adams) Van Middeldyk - The History of Puerto Rico: From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation

The larger Antilles with the groups of small islands to the north of them were supposed to be inhabited by a race named Guaycures, driven from the peninsula of Florida by the warlike Seminoles; the Guaycures, it is said, could easily have reached the Bahamas and traversed the short distance that separated them from Cuba in their canoes, some of which could contain 100 men, and once there they would naturally spread over the neighboring islands.

R. A. (Rudolph Adams) Van Middeldyk - The History of Puerto Rico: From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation

The larger Antilles, Cuba, Santo Domingo, and Puerto Rico, were occupied by a race which probably originated from some part of the southern division of the northern continent. The chroniclers mention the Guaycures and others as their possible ancestors, and Stahl traces their origin to a mixture of the Phoenicians with the aborigines of remote antiquity.

R. A. (Rudolph Adams) Van Middeldyk - The History of Puerto Rico: From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation