From Splendor to Nostalgia

By Miguel Iturria Savón

Havana, July 2007 (www.cubanet.org) - It was an ordeal to reach Güines, Mayabeque's City, and the most prosperous city south of Havana since the latter part of the XVIII Century. The very same that celebrated in 1837 the arrival of the railroad, connecting itself with the center of the Cuban capital, when the iron roads were a cutting edge technology springing up in North America and in a small amount of nations in the Old Continent.

You cannot reach old Cuba's Venice by railroad or by the Central Highway or by the stagnant waters of the Mayabeque River, (formerly clean and navigable) but through Route 52 in the Southern Circuit, a bus from Havana with three daily departures or through old trucks and oil tankers, noisy engines and astronomical prices. Only the rail lines with overgrown grass remain of the train, the sad looking station and the inhabitants' nostalgia, who augment the past of a Villa that now looks like an Old West town without train or gunslingers.

I arrived in Güines on a Friday under a very hot sun at ten o'clock in the morning. Off at the outskirts of the city, in front of the Maternity Hospital, founded by Marta Fernandez de Miranda, the wife of Dictator Fulgencio Batista, as a Children Dispensary. I walked on the main street to downtown. The park, built over the first city's cemetery, was as desolated as the portals and streets, including the near Esquina de Tejas (Corner of Tiles), seat of old dwellings of the most important families from Güines, the same that placed their names in the country's economy, history and culture.

In walking through the streets I knew from my childhood, I had an empty feeling of so many absent friends and nostalgia for so many institutions and services that are gone. I was at the Library and at the Museum. I consulted several documents in the Recorder's Office. I talked to specialists trying to reconstruct the history of a City that was the anteroom to several towns within the capital and it presumes to be the first settlement of San Cristóbal de La Habana (Saint Christopher of Havana), an honor being disputed at the same time by the most prominent sons of Batabanó, Melena del Sur and Nueva Paz.

The fertile soil of Güines favored the agriculture, cattle, industrial and urban development of the area. Reformers such as Francisco de Arango y Parreño and Joaquín de Ayestarán settled here and they developed the sugar industry at the beginning of the XIX Century. The area's landowners built sugar mills such as Alejandría the first one to use hydraulic power to move the machinery and Amistad (Friendship), donated to Don Luis de las Casas y Aragorri, Governor and General Captain of the Island between 1791 and 1796. As a ghost from yesterday, Amistad Sugar Mill remains standing. It is not working, but at the entrance of the Gomez-Mena family's residence, its last lawful owners before the ill-fated State confiscation, we find the majestic sculptural group El coleo (literally "Holding by the Tail"), reminding us of Pepe, the rebellious son who went to Spain where he died gored by a bull, next to his picador's horse.

This bullfighting monument was stolen by Captain Antonio Núñez Jiménez, a high ranking character in the Revolutionary Government, who dared to transfer it with an official excuse, but he had to return it to its original place due to the indignation and scandal of the people from Güines.

Plundering and scandals still hurt the sensibilities of Güines' inhabitants, who, with pride tell visitors about the tens of publications published in this Villa during the Colonial and Republican Eras. They say that local women wholly published one of those yellowing weeklies. They will show you, immediately, copies of Letras Güineras (Letters from Güines), a local and national pride due to its excellent contents and the relevant figures that honored its pages as well as the duration of the same.

In the City of the Mayabeque there are those who remember the visits of the Andalusian poet Federico García Lorca, the Spanish philologist Ramón Menéndez Pidal and the Cuban writer José M. Chacón y Calvo, in now those distant years of 1930 and 1937. The local press registers the fading memories of other characters, facts and institutions that enhance the identity of the City. Somebody talks about the park's trees and the clean water canals; of Güines Irrigation Community, whose government guaranteed the cleaning of ditches and the drainage of the Mayabeque River, then beautiful, navigable and mysterious.

In the shadows of the portals, an old man talks to me in a whisper about the private clinics and the mutual benefit societies, where you paid only three pesos a month and they would attend your family and even operate and would deliver your medicine at your home. He mentions the workers' dining halls created by the before mentioned Marta Fernández de Miranda, which would charge 25 cents a week for a daily lunch of meat, dessert and salad. He informs me about the cinema-theaters, the three instructions and recreation societies, each one with its own library and Brage Club, located almost under the bridge between Güines and San Nicolás. “Now here, there is almost nothing; not even the traditional Via Crucis of Christ, or the Afro-Cuban celebrations in Leguina District. People leave; they are not proud of what they have.”

A present day historian informs me at the Library about the different political, social and religious tendencies that lived in harmony within Güines, where the association Todo por Güines (Everything for Güines) did exist, formed by Communist politician Argentino González, criminal attorney Valeri del Busto and Mariano Zervigón, a mixed race person of diverse membership. All of them avoided their differences to face the most diverse problems of the community.

That's probably why, this city marked the life and the contributions of creative people like Francisco Calcagno, the author of the first Cuban Biographic Dictionary; of prolific historian Raimundo Cabrera and his daughter Lidia, an ethnologist with an extraordinary work, who nurtured figures such as Fernando Ortiz and Nicolás Quintana y Gómez. Latinist professor Vicentina Antuña, writers Carballido Rey and Iris Dávila and poet and writer Pío E. Serrano, director of Verbum Editorial in Madrid, are from Güines.

He talks also about the prestigious Güines High School, only comparable to those in the capital. Professors and lecturers taught in the same who, later on, gave prestige to the University of Havana. Some of them left the Island and taught in United States and European universities. The case for example, of mathematician Mario González, the author of books and pamphlets. The High School, now destroyed, was the stage of strugglers such as Mario Borrell, the pugnacious mulatto that belonged to the 26th of July Movement and fought against the prior tyranny.

When I asked as to the causes of so much human input, one of my hosts' smiles. “Here, we don't even have folkloric characters. Not even ‘Maceo’ the crazy one who imitated the Bronze Titan would dare to answer your question. It is better to talk about the past.”

Maybe they are right. The past, sometimes, turns out to be expressive. The present usually, is inscrutable.