Cueiba

Cueiba belongs to the wider Bayamo district of eastern Cuba, whose regional centre stands on a plain beside the Bayamo River. Bayamo was founded in 1513 by Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar and became one of the island's most important agricultural and commercial settlements during much of the sixteenth century. Its inland position offered relative protection from pirates, and the nearby regional setting connected plantations with routes toward the coast. A flood in 1616 filled the Cauto River with trees and wrecked vessels, cutting Bayamo off from direct sea access. Trade then continued through Manzanillo and overland routes into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The area around Cueiba therefore belongs to a landscape of river plains, plantations and inland communication rather than simply a remote rural district. Bayamo's prosperity depended on produce moving outward through a network that reached foreign Caribbean islands, and its urban institutions later made it the leading regional centre. The region also has a distinctive weather hazard known as the Bayamo wind. In 1827 the central settlement gained city status. Cueiba's setting is tied to the farming countryside around this river-plain centre and to the routes that sustained eastern Cuba's commercial life.

The later city of Las Tunas lies here.