HistoryofCuba.com is the kind of site that makes the phrase “personal website” sound misleadingly small. Jerry A. Sierra built a sprawling independent reference on Cuban history, and one of its surviving pages covers the 1873 Virginius incident in the middle of the Ten Years’ War.
Read the Virginius page at History of Cuba
The Virginius was a former Confederate blockade runner later used to carry men and supplies to Cuban insurgents fighting Spanish rule. Spanish forces captured the ship in 1873, and executions of crew members and passengers created an international crisis involving Spain, the United States, and Britain. It is exactly the sort of episode that gets compressed into a paragraph in broad histories but rewards a dedicated page of its own.
Sierra’s larger project is the more interesting Web artifact. He has described HistoryofCuba.com as a one-person operation maintained after hours and on weekends. A count he performed on the site found 1,021 files spread across folders and subfolders, including 450 text files and 571 graphics. The project contained about 207,000 words by that count, arranged as timelines, articles, image galleries, book excerpts, and historical timetables.
That scale explains why a page about one nineteenth-century maritime incident can exist without needing to justify itself to an editor. The old Web was unusually good at this. If somebody thought the Virginius deserved its own page, they could simply make one and connect it to a larger body of work.
The project also shows the maintenance burden hidden inside long-lived personal sites. Sierra later wrote publicly about refactoring old HTML, multiple generations of stylesheets, XHTML and HTML 4.01 pages, and JavaScript galleries that had accumulated over years. Some obsolete pieces were removed; others were deliberately kept because nostalgia was itself part of the archive.
That is useful context for anyone preserving an old site today. Longevity is not the same thing as freezing every byte forever. Sometimes survival means repairing the structure while keeping the historical material intact.