Articles of History of Cuba

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10th of October Causeway

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The poet Eliseo Diego alluded to this Havana street as “the rather enormous roadway of Jesús del Monte.” That was the name of that road until in 1918 the Havana City Council agreed to the request of the Association of Cuban Revolutionary Emigrants to give it the new name in homage to the glorious day in which Carlos Manuel de Céspedes gave the cry of Independence or Death.Its old name was due to the very Cuban custom of calling uncultivated land, covered with trees and bushes, and, by extension, a sparsely populated area, “monte”.

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Passing through Belascoain

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In 1850 the urbanization of Havana reached the Calzada de Galiano, with which the total urbanized area reached about four square kilometers and the population was around 140,000 inhabitants. This development continued uninterruptedly towards the West and already in 1870 it surpassed the Calzada de Belascoaín, with an area of ​​seven square kilometers and some 170,000 inhabitants. The capital was then enclosed between the Chávez River, the sea and Belascoaín, and for a definitive Havanan like Manuel Sanguily, everything that was beyond that road was simply “the countryside”.

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Cuban loves of Agustín Lara

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The year is 1932 and Agustín Lara begins a frantic race towards fame. He makes his first international tour on that date. In Paris he snatches the French and one of his compositions, Farolito, becomes a fashionable tune there. It is around that time that he makes his first trip to the Cuban capital, in the company of Pedro Vargas and Ana María Fernández. He returns in May 1939 and then makes a profession of love for Cuba. He declares: “I was returning from France… Havana opened its arms to me… and I was not ungrateful.

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Aleida Guevara: “Che is back again, with the shield over his arm”

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When she was four years old, she saw, in the gloom of Mom’s room, Dad caressing Ernesto’s head, as if he were saying goodbye to the youngest of the children. A month after turning five, she heard Fidel Castro on television and there, while he was reading a farewell letter, she discovered her mother in tears. At the age of six, Aleida Guevara learned that “daddy”, as she says to Che, had died. October is definitely a sad month. She wears the same eyes and sometimes the smile gives her away more than the surnames.