Cuba & Jamaica Map 1871 Regional Print - Havana, Santiago de Cuba, Kingston

This map of Cuba was published in Chicago in 1871 by Warner, Higgins & Beers, drawn from H. H. Lloyd & Co.'s separate Atlas of the United States and bound in alongside their Atlas of the State of Illinois, a common publishing practice of the period that paired detailed state atlases with a broader national and international section. The map is a hand-colored lithograph, outlined to mark administrative divisions and finished with the decorative border typical of Warner, Higgins & Beers's state atlas work, engraved by Worley & Bracher of Philadelphia and printed by F. Bourquin. It records Cuba and its surrounding waters at a genuinely turbulent moment: the island had been in open revolt since 1868, in what became known as the Ten Years' War, the first of Cuba's sustained independence conflicts against Spanish colonial rule.

Cities, towns, rivers, roads and railroads are all marked across the island, with relief shown through hachures rather than color tinting, giving the map a more technical, reference-oriented character than the decorative wall maps common elsewhere in American atlases of the period. Havana is prominently marked as the island's capital and principal port, its importance underscored by the density of roads and rail lines converging on the city from the surrounding countryside. The Bahamas and Jamaica appear at the edges of the sheet, providing geographic context for Cuba's position within the wider Caribbean even though the map's detailed treatment is reserved for Cuba itself. Published three years into the Ten Years' War, the map's careful infrastructure detail reflects both the commercial interest American publishers had in Cuba and the ongoing instability the war was bringing to the island's Spanish administration.

This map is a solid choice for a collector of Cuban revolutionary-era cartography or for anyone with family ties to the island during its long struggle for independence. An earlier, more decorative 1860 Johnson map covering Cuba, Jamaica and Puerto Rico together sits elsewhere in this collection; this 1871 Warner, Higgins & Beers sheet is narrower in scope but considerably more detailed in its road and railroad content, reflecting eleven years of change and a decade of open warfare between the two editions. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.