“From Clio’s Briefcase”
The Centenary Clock
When on December 31, 1833, the brown skinned mason Rafael Muñoz finished our church’s steeple, something still remained to be done… Old chronicles said, besides, that the cost of such construction was around two thousand eight hundred pesos and that Don Manuel Martínez was the area’s Parish Priest. On top of the steeple, in its carillon, the parish priest made it possible to place “three new bells,” an event that took place on February 20, 1834.
These two extraordinary happenings for the Villa allow us to remember others, as interesting and as suggestive, well before the years of 1833 and 1834, but all related to our Parish Church.
It was the year 1768. The date was October 15. On such date, a great storm called “Santa Teresa” hit Güines. A lot of water and wind would whirlpool against the neighborhood. About forty houses, big and small, collapsed and the whip of the storm would crack on the hamlet that Güines was at that time with such fury, “that it was necessary to take the Most Holy Sacrament out of the church being afraid of a major catastrophe and it was deposited in Don Miguel de Ayala’s house. Among the destroyed houses were those of the priest and the one being used by the hospital ‘Of the Pure and Immaculate Conception’. The nearby woodlands were destroyed and the Mayabeque topped its banks, causing floods in the area.”
On another year, October 22, 1773, the first Mass was celebrated next to the Main Altar, which had been sculpted by Valentín Sánchez and which had been built at a cost of four hundred and seventy pesos, the parish being then headed by Father Don José López de Trijas.
For sure that altar shook in its foundations,as did Güines itself, during the morning of June 6, 1777 around four o’clock in the morning, when the earth trembled for about two minutes, such phenomenon being felt throughout the neighborhood. And it could be affirmed also that the old church bells sounded the alarm on March 6, 1817, when a great fire damaged the town, then ruled by Ordinary Mayors Don Francisco María Héctor and Don Santiago Castellanos.
The building activity of the before mentioned Güines Parish Priest, Manuel Martínez erecting the church’s steeple, not only consisted in placing the 3 new bells on its pinnacle finished in 1833 by the brown skinned mason Muñoz. The sacred steeple would house since March 15, 1834 a public clock of “excellent mechanism made of bronze and steel and of superior quality, paid for by the neighbors, together with the Parish Priest and the Ordinary Mayors Don Juan Vázquez and Don Santiago Satre,” the chronicle stated.
Centenary clock, which hits with its hammer one of those bells that Parish Priest Martínez placed on the erected steeple of our Parish Church, not this one that today crowns the temple and which was built by Master Gorrondona, but the one that Parish Priest Martínez and brown skinned Muñoz longingly erected with fervor.
Centenary clock, which for a hundred and ten years has been an ever vigilant sentinel, as a tireless herald of the passage of time over the meridian of the fertile Mayabeque valley. Centenary clock which converts to music in the big bell’s bronze, the rhythm of life of an extensive parish; that yesterday, as told so by the devout tradition, those bells were melted in Güines itself, some of them, maybe that same big bell, vibrant, of a never equaled resonance by any others, among the thousands of bells that call the faithful in Cuba to their parishes. Bells that were melted, it is said, and to create the alloy, piling up in the crucibles, fistfuls of gold ounces, genuine “peluconas” (an ancient Spanish gold coin) and the silver and copper of monetary pieces of less value, that as offerings, the rich and the poor poured as ingredients for the peerless alloy (gold, silver and copper), that, without pilfering or fraud, is the efficient cause why the old Güinero bells ring with musical vibrations that do not have rhythmic similarities in any other part of the nation.
Continue: “Arango y Parreño” Park
(Copied from NEC-OTIUM, official bulletin of Güines Chamber of Commerce, February 1944. Edited and translated by the staff of Círculo Güinero de Los Ángeles, Los Ángeles, California)
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