The Isle of Youth - An Island of a Thousand Treasures

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the novel Treasure Island in which his young protagonist, Jim Hawkins, set sail on board the Spanish schooner the Hispaniola. Ever since it was published in 1883, this novel about pirates and buried treasure was much talked about and it became a must have in the libraries of children and for adults with a sense of adventure.

I would like to tell you about a place that could have been the model for Stevenson's island although it doesn't have just one treasure but thousands of them. I have seen all these treasures and so can you if you venture there. I am referring to the Isla de la Juventud or, the Isle of Youth, shaped in the form of a coma and located south of the main island of Cuba and in the center of the Batabanó Gulf. It is the largest of the more than 600 cayos and islands which make up the Canarreos Archipelago.

The Isle of Youth has a surface area of 2,200 square kilometers and is bathed by the warm blue waters of the Caribbean Sea. Its name refers to the thousands of young Cubans, Africans, Latin-Americans, Caribbean islanders and Asians who have studied and trained there to become professionals in the areas of medicine and health, engineering, architecture, geography, and in other fields of study.

The number of foreign students studying in the dozens of schools located in that territory was such that when Javier Perez de Cuéllar, then Secretary General of the United Nations, visited the island, he expressed that he felt as if he were in the General Assembly of the UN. But this was not its first name. On June 13, 1494, when Admiral Christopher Columbus ran into it, it was baptized as La Evangelista. But his sailors called it Isle of Pines for its abundance of pine trees visible from all the coastal areas. However, the aboriginal inhabitants had different names such as Camaraco (Land of Water and Forests), Guanaja (Turkey Island), Siguanea and Ahao