Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean
The Classic Taíno lived in eastern Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico. They spoke a dialect called Classic Taíno. Compared to their neighbors, the Classic Taíno had substantially developed agricultural societies. Puerto Rico was divided into twenty chiefdoms which were organized into one united kingdom or confederation, Borinquen. Hispaniola was divided into roughly 45 chiefdoms, which were organized into five kingdoms under the leadership of the chief of each area's premier chiefdom. Beginning around 1450, Classic Taíno from Hispaniola began migrating to eastern Cuba; they are conventionally known as the Cuban Taíno. The Cuban Taíno gained power over some of Cuba's earlier Western Taíno inhabitants, the Ciboney, but no regional or island-wide political structure had developed on the island at the time of Spanish colonization of the Americas.
Hispaniola
The island was called by various names by its native people, the Taíno Amerindians. No known Taíno texts exist, hence, historical evidence for those names comes to us through three European historians: the Italian Pietro Martyr d‘Anghiera, and the Spaniards Bartolomé de las Casas and Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo. Fernández de Oviedo and de las Casas both recorded that the island was called Quizqueia (supposedly "Mother of all Lands") by the Taíno. D'Anghiera added another name, Haiti ("Mountainous Land"), but later research shows that the word does not seem to derive from the original Arawak Taíno language. (Quisqueya is today mostly used in the Dominican Republic.) Although the Taínos' use of Quizqueia is verified, and the name was used by all three historians, evidence suggests that it probably was the Taíno name of the whole island, and for a region (now known as Los Haitises) in the northeastern section of the present-day Dominican Republic.