Images of Güines
“From Clio’s Briefcase”
Snipets of Local History
On Gras Street (formerly called “Four Palms”) as told by past chronicles, very important local businesses were located. Today, such street is merely residential. Only at its ends there are establishments in connection with the important thoroughfares that limit the same on Máximo Gómez and Maceo Streets.
Prior to 1879, at the corner of Raimundo Cabrera (Suárez) and Máximo Gómez Streets (next to the Ten-Cents Store) there was a clothing store. The ancestral home of the Ayala family, that is the one we are referring to, had a store called La Yerbita (The Little Grass), precisely because in front of it, where presently two kiosks are located, the little plaza was covered with grass, little grass that served to give its name to the store.
Where Xiqués’s widow lives at the present time and where the old pharmacy establishment under the name Xiqués is located, there was a hotel, the best in the Villa, named La Estrella (The Star) also known as the one “Of the Americans.”
It is told, that being the best in town, it always had lots of customers. One time, a carrousel and circus enterprise arrived in Güines. With it, came a snake charmer. One of them escaped from the box where the charmer kept them; such charmer living in the referred hotel La Estrella. The ophidian’s escape caused the hotel’s ruin. The snake—said to be poisonous—went to the ditch. But the neighbors and customers of the hotel refused any further relationship with such business, causing it to close.
It remained in ruins (keeping its elegant front columns) when Dr. Antonio Fernández rebuilt the building again.
When the first exhibition of the electric light was made in Güines—today being provided by Cuban Electrical Company—the Havana Central that installed such service, selected the building occupied by a hardware store called of Aldecoa (Máximo Gómez and Nicolás García, presently occupied by some pool parlors) to offer the public the brilliant illumination bulbs of the new service, which radiating during the evening, lighted “as day” (as it was daylight) the former El Candado (The Lock) hardware store, named as told before of Aldecoa.
Translated by the staff of Círculo Güinero de Los Ángeles
Continue to: Images of Güines during the "Reconcentration"
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