The “top 100” list includes sites spread across 56 countries. Its publication begins an effort to designate geological sites around the world that are iconic and recognized by the entire geoscientific community by virtue of their impact on the understanding of the planet and its history.

The IUGS Executive Committee has endorsed these 100 sites as “the first and inspiring steps towards a broader program that will recognize those geosites with the highest scientific importance in the world.”

In the certificate of the International Union of Geological Sciences that includes the terraces of Maisí in the list of The First 100 Geological Heritage Sites of the IUGS, it is read that:

“An IUGS Geological Heritage Site is a key location with geological features and/or processes of international scientific relevance, used as a reference, and/or with a substantial contribution to the development of geological sciences throughout history.”

More than 200 specialists from almost 40 nations and 10 international organizations, representing different disciplines of Earth sciences, have participated in the selection.

As part of the process, 181 candidate sites in 56 countries were proposed, then evaluated by 33 international experts who defined the IUGS Top 100 Geological Heritage Sites list.

On the IUGS website, the Maisí terraces are presented as “one of the best preserved sequences of elevated marine and coral terraces in the world due to the interaction of the global sea level and tectonics.”

It is considered that they are “an important source of information to reveal the tectonics of the Greater Antilles within the Caribbean geological domain during the Quaternary period (…) The marine terraces in Cuba can be correlated with global changes in sea level in the Quaternary.

“In addition to being in an area regularly hit by hurricanes, this area is important for studying wave energy during those weather events.”

The Maisí terraces share space on the world list with iconic places such as the Grand Canyon or the Yellowstone volcanic and hydrothermal system (USA), the Perito Moreno glacier (Argentina), the Iguazú falls (Argentina-Brazil), Torres del Paine (Chile), the caldera of Santorini (Greece), the inselberg or mount island Mount Uluru (Australia), the sea of ​​sand in the Namib desert (Namibia), the Victoria Falls (Zambia-Zimbabwe) or the Shilin Stone Forest (China).

There are also sites with some of the oldest rocks on Earth (South Africa), traces of primitive life from Australia and China, some of the best dinosaur fossil remains from Canada, the earliest evidence of early hominin development from Tanzania and the sea rocks of the top of the world (Mount Everest).

IUGS Top 100 Geological Heritage Sites List:

Interglacial coralline and raised marine terraces of the Quaternary of Maisí

Geological period:

Quaternary

Main geological interest:

Geomorphology and active geological processes

Stratigraphy and sedimentology

Location:

Punta de Maisi, Guantanamo province, Cuba

20° 08′ 10” N, 074° 13′ 59” W

In a note signed by the Geology Directorate of the Ministry of Energy and Mines and the Institute of Geology and Paleontology of Cuba, it is highlighted that “the recognition of the IUGS gives visibility to these sites, identifies them as of maximum scientific value.

“These are sites that served to develop the science of geology, especially its early history. They are the world’s best demonstrations of geological features and processes. They are the places of fabulous discoveries of the Earth and its history”.

It is also recalled that the scientific community has long called for the establishment of a world program with global standards for the recognition of sites of great international importance.

“The IUGS Geological Heritage Sites project, approved by IUGS and UNESCO, has created the right conditions for collaboration towards this great milestone, which will inspire the work of this ambitious program in the near future.”

They also point out that many of the “top 100″ are well protected in national parks, geoparks, geosites and nature reserves, “but many are not.”

They add that “recognition and visibility of the IUGS Top 100 Geological Heritage Sites can lead to their increased appreciation, their use as educational resources and, most importantly, their preservation.”

On the left, shaded relief superimposed on a satellite image showing the terraces. On the right, topographic profile showing the inner edge of each terrace level in the Maisí area. Image: IUGS.

Currently, Maisí is a protected natural area. In the future, considering its internationally recognized geological value, it could become a geopark, as part of a process that began in 2021 with the Viñales Geopark.

According to specialists, due to its remarkable geological diversity, there is potential in Cuba for the creation of around 20 geoparks.

According to reports from the Minem Geology Directorate, in the first quarter of 2023 the geological-morphological study will be completed to assess the creation of a geopark in La Gran Piedra (Santiago de Cuba). Likewise, next year a similar study will begin in the Sierra de Cubitas (Camagüey).

Another study, with a start date in the last quarter of 2022, will have the same objective in the Guamuhaya massif, in the center of the Island.

The International Union of Geological Sciences is one of the largest scientific organizations in the world, with 121 national members, including Cuba, bringing together more than a million geoscientists.

Some information about the terraces of Maisí:

-The marine and coral terraces are formed by coral limestones with abundant fossil remains, ranging from the Upper Pleistocene Jaimanitas formation (marine isotope stage 5e, 122 ± 6,000 years. In short: about 122,000 years) and older units within the Pleistocene.

-Some 28 levels of terraces are observed, with an elevation of up to 560 m.

-Most of the terraces are very well preserved. Fossil tidal niches, caverns, and other karst features are found. These represent approximately two million years’ worth of sea level fluctuations.

-The zone is tectonically linked to the Oriente transform fault zone in eastern Cuba, which is the boundary between the North American and Caribbean plates, where block uplifts of 0.33 mm/year are recorded.

-Geomorphologically, the area is a large ring about 75 km long that covers the eastern coastal zone of Cuba like a ladder that is narrow to the north and south, and wider in the eastern corner. The steps are cut by rivers that form gorges with large transverse outcrops. Due to tilting and folding, the same step changes altitude along the coast. The lower terrace has blocks overturned from the sea by hurricanes and features of landslides such as crowns are observed.

-This area of ​​Maisí, like other marine terraces on the coast of Cuba, is part of an international collaboration research project between the Institute of Geology and Paleontology (IGP) of Cuba and several French universities. Researchers take coral samples and carry out measurements in the field and analyzes in laboratories to determine in greater detail how and when the marine terraces of the archipelago formed.

(By: Deny Extremera San Martin/Cubadebate)

The couple travels by sea to Mexico, where the poet will assume the position of Consul General of Chile, and once in that position it will be very difficult for him to move to the Cuban capital without a plausible reason. That is why Delia asks Marinello that the Cuban friends write to the Chilean authorities “and let them know of your wish that Pablo pay you a visit.” He adds that the poet “is getting quite ahead of his Canto General”, and that “if he does not write personally and has left me that pleasure”, it is because he is overwhelmed by a series of “tedious and unpleasant” letters that he must send to Chile and he wants take advantage of the stopover that the ship they are traveling on will make in Lima to send them.

That handwritten letter dated July 29, 1940, which is in the collections of the José Martí National Library and whose reading is difficult, especially the initial page, due to the faded ink, bears a postscript from Neruda himself. “I can’t wait to go to Cuba,” he tells Marinello and asks him to greet Wenceslao Roces, translator of Marx into Spanish, the poet Manuel Altolaguirre, Nicolás Guillén, Francisco and Félix Pita Rodríguez, and Emilio Ballagas. He immediately adds: “And in particular to all of Havana except for the old bastard Juan Ramón Jiménez.”

It is worth clarifying that by then Platero’s poet had left Cuba. They had an old quarrel, which time had been intensifying, motivated by Juan Ramón’s opinion about the Chilean’s poetry, whom he considered “a great bad poet, a clumsy translator of himself who sometimes confuses the original with the translation” . Opinion that in 1942 he modified to say that Neruda expressed “with exuberant trial and error an authentic general Hispanic-American poetry, with all the natural revolution and the metamorphosis of life and death of this continent” to conclude: “You are prior, prehistoric and turbulent, closed and gloomy”, a judgment to which the Chilean was not insensitive, who did not stop expressing “the deep emotion with which I read his lines, which with their sincerity magnify the admiration that I have felt for his work throughout my life”.

deed song
It will not be until 1942 that Neruda comes to Havana for the first time. The great communist poet has been invited by a Catholic writer, José María Chacón y Calvo, then Director of Culture of the Ministry of Education. At the National Academy of Arts and Letters he gave four lectures, two of them on Francisco de Quevedo, and he evoked, says Volodia Teitelboim, in his biography of the poet, “for the first time in America, His Majesty’s Post Office, Don Juan de Tassis , Count of Villamediana, in love with the Queen, who one day sets fire to the curtains of the Palace stage in order to have a pretext to flee with the tall forbidden beloved in his arms”.

He came back in 1949 or 1950 for a few hours. He was returning to Mexico from Europe – he had attended a peace conference in Paris and the celebrations for the sesquicentennial of Pushkin’s birth in Moscow – and the plane he was traveling on made a stopover in Havana due to a technical failure. Persecuted in Chile after President González Videla’s betrayal of the Popular Front, then-Senator Pablo Neruda was “the wandering poet,” as the journalist Enrique de la Osa called him.

When he returned to Havana for the last time, at the end of 1960, he brought the poems of Canción de gesta, the first book – he boasted of it – “that a poet in any part of the world had dedicated to the Cuban Revolution”, and which closes with a Meditation on the Sierra Maestra that is also a summary of the poet’s life in that dawning hour: “… I receive my past in a cup / and I raise it for the entire earth, / and although my homeland circulates in my blood / without his career ever fading / at this hour my nocturnal reason / points to Cuba its common flag / of the dark hemisphere that awaited / finally a true victory…”

On that visit, in the Plaza de la Revolución, before a million people, the poet read, with his peculiar intonation, his song To Fidel Castro: “Fidel, Fidel, the people thank you / words in action and deeds that sing , / from afar I have brought you / a glass of the wine of my country…”

Bohemia magazine offered a cocktail in his honor and, of course, he did not leave Cuba without tasting the dormant black beans, the tachinos, the yucca with mojo and the roasted pork slices with juice at La Bodeguita del Medio. Aware of his presence in that very Cuban restaurant, two excellent comedians, René de la Nuez and the “Galician” Posada, did not want to miss the opportunity to greet him and, oddly enough, they entered the establishment riding a donkey, which made Neruda burst out laughing.

“The usual nonsense of the poet, his inconvenient attitudes, which led him to be offensive at times, perhaps without meaning to, did not leave the slightest memory,” narrator Lisandro Otero wrote in his memoirs (1997).

His love and fidelity to the Cuban Revolution were not clouded by those “painful misunderstandings” of 1966, when Cuban writers, in an open letter, judged “his poetic, social and revolutionary activity,” according to Neruda himself. The poet, offended, responded sharply.

While he did not forgive those who signed the letter, whom he lambasted or disparaged in his memoirs, the incident did not dampen his sympathies for Cuba and his Revolution. He says it explicitly in I confess that I have lived: “A black point, a small black point within a process, does not have great importance in the context of a great cause. I have continued singing, loving and respecting the Cuban Revolution, its people, its noble protagonists.”

(By Ciro Bianchi)

In a Cuban television report, it was reported that among the novelties, the presentation of a collection of books on the work and legacy of Eusebio Leal Spengler stands out. One of the texts is You have to believe in Cuba, a compendium of interviews conducted with the historian by the journalist Magda Resik, Director of Communication of the OHCH.

According to Resik, under the seal of Ediciones Boloña, the El Historiador collection has already begun, bringing together the best of Leal Spengler’s thought and work.

It will be a kind of anthology of the thoughts and ideas of Leal Spengler on various topics: heritage, history and national culture, argued the Director of Communication of the OHCH.

Resik added that the Andar La Habana collection is also being expanded, which includes all the programs that the eternal Historian of the City led for more than 20 years.

As part of the program of activities, there will be new presentations of the documentary The Capitol of all Cubans, by the OHCH, which summarizes the restoration work carried out in that building.

Resik announced that the Beloved Homeland room will be inaugurated in the Eusebio Leal Spengler House, a space that shows his close relationship with Cuban identity, his defense of Cuban values ​​and his passion for Cuba.

As usual, the traditional ceremony is planned in the Bandstand, the founding site of the city.

Humble and simple, as his colleagues remember him, this man from Santiago could not perhaps imagine that his first surname would name the contents of a bottle that reflects everything for which he worked for more than 40 years.

On September 10, 2020, an unfortunate illness ended Navarro’s life. Time later, in the warehouses of San José, he would follow the tribute. Members of the Cuban rum masters movement came together to select, mix and create a spirit as special as his mentor.

Havana Club Don Navarro. It was the first time that a rum would bear the name of a master rum maker. “It was a collective selection. We were looking for a sensory profile that would represent the character of whoever our guide was. We chose several bases, including Centenario, created by Navarro and which gave rise to the birth of extra-aged rums”, says Juan Carlos González, current leader of the Movement.

Molecules of 40-year-old rum, the same one that Navarro distilled, are in this product that the company Havana Club International S.A. has just launched on the market. A very exclusive edition, of only 1,000 bottles each year, available – at a price of 125 USD – in very select places in Havana, Varadero and Santiago de Cuba. Also exclusively internationally, through the online sales site The Whiskey Exchange.

For Asbel Morales it was a challenge to make a rum with the name of the eternal defender of the Cuban rum culture. “In this liquid is the aroma of Cubanness, of Cuban light rum, just what Navarro always wanted,” she says.

“We are bringing to our country and to the world a rum made from the heart, which we intend to identify Navarro, with a very strong charisma, a happy and simple people. An excellent professional,” adds Salomé Alemán, the first female Rum Master in Cuba.

The bottle presents a sober, warm design, attributes that characterized the Master. Outlining the label, finely drawn chains are found as a symbol of union between all the masters of Cuban rum and of continuity, by the legacy passed down from generation to generation.

Navarro, doubly Master

One day in 1988 Salomé would obtain her degree in Chemical Engineering. At that time Navarro was already walking between rows of large barrels and his invention, the Havana Club 7 years, would have been created for a decade. “The foundational rum”, they would say, because it gave rise to rums as complex as those that today make up the Havana Club prestige range.

When Salomé began social service at the Santa Cruz Rum Factory, it had been 17 years since Navarro’s first visit to a distillery. That day he would enter that ship to never leave the world of the smell of brandy and wood. He left behind a time of teaching work at the Universidad de Oriente. But he would take with him the gift of teaching.

Navarro became the mentor of a whole generation of teachers and although he worked in the rum factory in Santiago de Cuba, he participated in the production processes of all the factories in the country. “When someone asked him a question, he took a piece of paper and explained it. Many still treasure those little pieces of paper with annotations from the Master”, says Salomé.

He was a reference for all, an example of a man, a friend, a father and a teacher, sums up Juan Carlos González.

The challenge of maintaining know-how

Cuban light rum is the result of a culture that has more than 150 years of history. It was born in 1862 in the city of Santiago de Cuba marking a technological turn with respect to the rest of the rums produced in the Caribbean area. Since then, the complex mixtures have spread, in successive aging stages, transmitted from generation to generation.

After the revolutionary triumph, the challenge of maintaining that know-how began, especially – Salomé recalls – due to the departure of great producers such as Bacardí.

When Navarro joined the rum industry, he did so with the challenge of continuing to perfect those practices. “He was able to interpret how the barrels work, by type and in various stages, according to their position and temperatures. His way of doing things and his ability to work was ingenious”, highlights Maestro Manuel Calderón.

However, the responsibility to internalize inherited traditions is perennial. How to maintain the aroma and flavor of a liquor even if it is aged up to 40 years is, in the opinion of Asbel Morales, the great challenge of the rum masters. “How did we do it? Because light rum was created and we have never betrayed it. Because it is given historical continuity in the ways of doing things”.

Teachers, adds Salomé, must be prepared to identify in their sensory memory, from the raw materials to the finished rums. “Rum is the happy son of sugar cane, but its production is not easy, it is a complex process.”

There are nine master rum makers in the country. For Salomé, this means a personal, “patriotic” commitment, because “it is Cuba, it is its history.” Because rum is not born from a magical combination, it is a cultural heritage that is transmitted from master to master, as Navarro emphasized.

(By: Lissett Izquierdo Ferrer)

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”. It was, by decision of the Development Board, the first paved road in Havana starting in 1796, and began to receive the name of calzada, that is, path paved with stones. It was a section of the road that led to the towns of Santiago de las Vegas and Bejucal; the only road that led from the city and into the countryside.

Sugar, tobacco, yarey hats

In lands of the current municipality of Diez de Octubre there was a sugar mill. The origin of the parish of Jesús del Monte is lost in the mists of time, as its construction began in 1695 when the priest Cristóbal Bonifá de Rivera devised to build it in a space of his property so that it would serve the owners of the sugar mill. and their slaves and neighbors.

The tobacco plains, developed along the Agua Dulce and Maboa streams, gave relative prosperity to the town, which in 1765 was declared head of the district and its church ceased to be an auxiliary parish to become an independent parish. In 1820 Jesús del Monte was already a municipality, and it lost that status three years later.

At one end of the outer wall of the parish there is an inscription that no one stops to read. It is engraved in stone. It says: “A league to Havana”. For Havanans from the periphery, only the center and the old part of the city deserve to be recognized as Havana. Perhaps that is the meaning of the inscription, although it may well obey the belief, still in vogue in 1863, that towns such as Jesús del Monte and el Cerro could not join the body of Havana because, as stated on that date the historian Jacobo de la Pezuela, “they are still separated by large uninhabited spaces”.

In Jesús del Monte, the humblest residents earned their living thanks to the sale of guano and yarey hats that they wove themselves, while the transit of travelers, carts and muleteers contributed at the same time their due thanks to the toll that was collected in the toll established in the area. The establishment of the Habana-Bejucal railway compromised and delayed the development of the town.

In 1846, more than 2,000 people lived in Jesús del Monte, and in 1858 there were 4,000 residents, and the villages of La Víbora, Arroyo Apolo, Arroyo Naranjo and other hamlets were settled in its five square leagues. There was a stage in which Jesús del Monte came to dispute with Cerro and Puentes Grandes “the animation and the attendance in the summer seasons”. Those were times when people spoke of “the purity of its atmosphere and the amenity of its landscape”.

That boom, however, was short-lived. Jesús del Monte never supplanted these towns as an elegant neighborhood, a role that El Vedado was awarded, and lost in territorial extension when Arroyo Naranjo was divided, which then included the hamlets of Arroyo Naranjo and San Juan.

From the trees of the Calzada de Jesús del Monte, then called Camino de Santiago (de las Vegas), twelve of the vegueros who rebelled in 1723 were hanged, and for the third time, against the arbitrary and abusive tobacconist arranged by the government colonial. And Jesús del Monte was also the scene of the Creole resistance against the English invasion of 1762.

Due to its location, on a height facing the city, it was a strategic place for the defense of the town, and an almost unique route for its supply. In those days, there died a natural death, José Antonio Gómez y Bullones, mayor of Guanabacoa, hero of the popular resistance against the invader, whom he faced with the blow of a machete.Ssix kilometers

It is a road that must be six kilometers long. It starts at the corner of Tejas and ends at La Palma. There are no fewer than five bank branches along the entire route of this street, and the section that runs between Estrada Palma and Luis Estévez streets, and the one on the corner of Toyo, whose bakery has been serving since 1832, is very lively.

Six kilometers

The best Galician broth in Havana was offered at El Bodegón de Toyo. Also missing are Josefina Siré fritters, in the portals of the León café, reputed to be among the best in the city; Out of the hands of a woman who enjoyed a comfortable economic position – she was the owner of the cookie factory that bears her surname – hers and who clung to those fries as her only means of subsistence. The two Police Stations that were on the Calzada –the eleventh, Toyo, and the fourteenth, in Santa Amalia- are now schools. On the corner of Calle Carmen is the Alejandro de Humboldt bookstore, which we still call La Polilla.

The space that was later occupied by the Tosca cinema, in the section between Estrada Palma and Luis Estévez, was held until 1915 by the Gran Liceo de Jesús del Monte, adapted for a movie theater. On the corner of Agua Dulce, the Gran Cine was demolished to build, in 1945, the Florida cinema, with its 1,200 seats. Other cinemas on the road were Apolo, Moderno, Gran Cinema and Martha. None works as such anymore.

On September 4, 1933, a sergeant named Batista left one of the apartments in the Toyo knife building to overthrow the constituted government and become the strong man of the Republic. Nearby was the Cooperativa Médica de La Habana clinic, -the old Casuso, as it was called when this chronicler was a child- converted his building into an apartment house, after he had installed a nursing home there .

And since we mentioned that nursing home, it is worth remembering that there were several along this Calzada, from Dependientes -current Hospital Diez de Octubre- at number 130 of the road, to the Santa Teresa de Jesús sanatorium -current Hogar Castellana. Between one and the other, some pocket clinics have few clients and few resources, such as Santa Gema, Santa Clara, El Sol and Nuestra Señora de Lourdes, installed in the ostentatious Párraga mansion, opposite what was the bus stop of the Víbora.

(By: Ciro Bianchi Ross/Cubadebate)

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”.

Belascoaín linked San Lázaro with Monte. As later, Infanta linked San Lázaro with Agua Dulce. In Monte and Belascoaín there was a marsh. It was filled and the Four Paths emerged. The path to the Cerro began there, which continued to Quemados de Marianao thanks to the Puentes Grandes. From the Esquina de Tejas started the Jesús del Monte road with its Agua Dulce bridge, which the chronicler always heard about, but never got to see.

The Jesús del Monte farmhouse already existed in the 18th century. He left behind the village of La Víbora and entered Arroyo Apolo where, in La Palma, it forked towards Santiago de las Vegas and Bejucal, and, if it turned to the left, towards El Calvario and Managua.

It was Captain General Leopoldo O’Donnell, the so-called Leopard of Lucena, Governor General of the Island between 1843 and 1848, who gave this street its name in honor of his friend Diego de León, Count of Belascoaín, who tragically died in 1841. Until then it was called Calzada de la Beneficencia and ran between Calzada de San Luis Gonzaga —Reina— and Calle Ancha del Norte —San Lázaro—, that is, from the hermitage of San Luis Gonzaga to the House of Maternity and Charity. And in the opposite direction, he passed Reina and reached Monte. It would run from the sea to the Four Paths. Since 1911 his official name is Father Varela.

The hermitage was demolished in 1835 when the Paseo Militar or Tacón was built —later Carlos III and now Salvador Allende. The Charity suffered the same fate in the mid-1950s when the State acquired the old mansion and the land where it was located to build the building for the National Bank of Cuba, which after a meticulous process of remodeling and readaptation houses the Hospital Hermanos Ameijeiras, although the Treasury of the Nation is still kept in the vaults located in the basements of that nursing home.

Some of the curiosities of the Calzada de Belascoaín will be discussed shortly. In Belascoaín and Zanja, where the minimax La Mía is now located, there was at the beginning of the 17th century, a pipe for the manufacture of sugar that enriched its owner. To make this trapiche possible, the man cleared the grove and cultivated a cane field.

On the same corner, but on the opposite sidewalk, crossing Zanja, the OK cafe prided itself on making the best sandwiches in Havana, which was not far from the truth. A few blocks from there, at the Café Strand, on the corner of San José, Alejo Cossío del Pino, Minister of the Interior (Interior) under President Grau, was gunned down on the night of February 11, 1952. attack with which some tried to justify the coup d’état of March 10.

At the Hotel San Luis, at number 73 of Belascoaín, Rómulo Gallegos, the author of Doña Bárbara and president of Venezuela, recently overthrown at the time, spent time. And beyond, in the Vista Alegre café, on the stretch of street that runs between San Lázaro and Malecón, Sindo Garay and his son Guarionex, Graciano Gómez, Chepín and Manuel Luna, among other composers and performers, established, in the first decades of the 20th century, a kind of general headquarters of the Cuban trova, and there emerged outlined, said Eduardo Robreño, no less than fifty of the most popular melodies of our popular songbook.

Cristóbal Díaz Ayala, a prominent Cuban musicographer based in Puerto Rico, was born 90 years ago in the small hotel or guest house that opened its doors on the upper reaches of Vista Alegre.

House of the three kilos
Movie theaters deserve a full stop on this road. The Cuatro Caminos cinema, in Belascoaín between Tenerife and Campanario, does not exist. There is also no Oriente cinema, on the corner of San José. The Belascoaín (Astor) cinema in Belascoaín between Peñalver and Concepción de la Valla, is closed. The Bayamo (formerly Miami) on the corner of San Rafael, is a store of the Fund for Cultural Assets. El Favorito, on the corner of Peñalver, is the headquarters of a choreographic company.

The Palace cinema, in Belascoaín between Virtudes and Concordia, is now a warehouse…

Although it is a street very populated with houses and residential buildings, Belascoaín is also an eminently commercial street, especially from Carlos III towards the sea.

In front of the Masonic National Temple, the House of 1, 2 and 3 cents, better known as House of Three Kilos, today Yumurí, opened its doors, a fabric, electrical effects and household goods store, which reopened with that name in the 1970s as part of a commercial chain called Amistad.

Before, passing the Troya fur shop, almost arriving in San Rafael, and using the facilities of the Le Grand Paris store, the Primor fur shop had opened its doors, which manufactured, exclusively, shoes for girls who would be fifteen or older. that they would marry. El Siglo XX was very famous, on the corner of Neptuno: candy store, cafeteria, confectionery and fine food trade, which had advanced with the century.

The Fifth Police Station, on the corner of Concepción de la Valla, was dark because of the crimes, abuses, and torture that took place there. In Machado’s time, he was commanded by the infamous Captain Constantino Albuerne, who narrowly escaped being lynched at the fall of the dictatorship, and in Batista’s day, his supervisor was none other than the bloodthirsty Lieutenant Colonel Estan Ventura Novo.

The National Police Investigations Bureau also operated there before it was transferred to 23rd Avenue, at the entrance to the Almendares Bridge. Today the old police unit is a basic secondary school, while the Higher Institute of Design is located in the so-called Casa de las Viudas, in Belascoaín and Maloja, so called because in the Colonia it served as a shelter for women whose spouses —all officers of the Spanish army—had died in their struggle against the independence of Cuba. The Ministry of Health worked there for years.

At the time, the crime that remained in the popular imagination aroused many comments, such as that of the beautiful Murcian, in Belascoaín and Nueva del Pilar. In Belascoaín and Virtudes, the car in which journalist Ramón Vasconcelos was travelling, who was then immersed in a campaign for the vindication of the Liberal Party, was shot at by Joven Cuba militants, who had been disqualified by President Grau because of his support for Machado. The so-called Golden Feather of Cuban journalism, the most widely read journalist on the island, was seriously injured in the attack.

It is not possible to talk about the Calzada de Belascoaín without referring to its warehouses and tobacco and cigarette factories. Competitor Gaditana, the so-called “unique cigar” in that company’s advertising, was, in its own way, the fifth Cuban producer, and the same place, but as regards the production of tobacco, it was the factory of the Romeo y Julieta brand. .

The woman who, for economic reasons or because of the “disgrace” of having taken a “bad step”, was unable to take care of her child, could deliver him to the Maternity Home without having to show her face or reveal her identity. identity. For that, on the side facade of the building that overlooked the Belascoaín road, there was a lathe.

The infant was placed in it and the tank rotated at the touch of a bell. On the other side, the abandoned child was received by a nun from the Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul, a congregation that attended that semi-private institution that tried to make up for official negligence in its attempt to redeem evils that the State did not suppress or remedy.

Upon entering, the children were given the surname Valdés in memory of Fray Jerónimo Valdés, a bishop who had the noble gesture of giving them his and who did much for the health and education of the most needy. They received education there and were trained for a trade. The most intellectually gifted were helped if they decided to pursue higher studies. A boy from that House, Juan Bautista Valdés, became a doctor and became director of the institution. The poet Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés, who would make the pseudonym Placido famous, was also a foundling.

(By: Ciro Bianchi Ross)

This was one of the works that were damaged by the shock wave of the explosion that occurred on May 6 at the Hotel Saratoga.

The piece, by Cuban painter Miguel Díaz Salinero (1874-1944), is an appropriation of a photograph taken in 1892 of José Martí, in Kingston, Jamaica. The artist, a student of Leopoldo Romañach (1862-1951), dedicated a large part of his work to developing this type of iconographic work, especially of the National Hero, about whom he made more than a dozen pieces, some of which are part of the collection of the José Martí Birthplace Museum.

According to Juan Carlos Bermejo, director of the easel painting restoration workshop, the painting received several impacts and inlays of crystals and solid materials. “The most serious damage was in the head area, but there were scattered damage throughout the surface and the frame.”

The piece had been restored in 2013 in the workshop itself, when it was ready to be exhibited at the Martí Theater from its reopening on February 24, 2014: “On that occasion we put some patches on the canvas, we touched up the painting and we varnish”.

The piece had been restored in 2013 in the workshop itself, when it was ready to be exhibited at the Martí Theater from its reopening on February 24, 2104. Photo: Workers.

“Now it was necessary to reline it —explains the expert restorer and also a photographer— because there were numerous breakages and this structurally compromised the work. The relining was done with high quality linen and as an adhesive we used wax-resin, which is the most recommended due to the relative humidity and other peculiarities of Cuba. We changed the reinforcement brackets to the frame. The frame also suffered from the impacts, we reconstructed the damage of the molding, and applied a patina of aging”.

“Upon receiving the piece, the first thing was to relax the support, says Bermejo. Then, we remove the canvas from the frame to proceed with the relining, a process that takes heat so that both fabrics adhere. Once the ironing is finished, we clean the excess wax-resin, return the work to the frame and start the stucco, whose function is to reconstruct, with a mixture of wax and calcium carbonate, the surface of the lost fabric and the damaged pictorial layer, imitating the original texture. Then we varnish and touch up with the appropriate pigment. As a closure, the finishing varnish”.

This restoration is the result of the collective work of specialists such as the veteran Leandro Grillo, Antonio Torrens, Juan Carlos Bermejo and Alejandro Mato, the latter still a student at the University of the Arts.

By: Ciro Bianchi Ross

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, there are that Sueño guajiro and those Coplas that were born in the immense Yumurí prairie”. He is here again in 1952. At La Bodeguita del Medio he meets Sindo Garay and at the Montmartre cabaret he plays the piano and leads a violin orchestra. He performs outdoors at the Saratoga hotel. Researcher Radamés Giro affirms: “His interest in Cuban music is reflected in La cumbancha -tribute to Cuban percussion recorded by the Trio Matamoros, Antonio Machín and the Caney quartet-, Noche criolla and the danzonete Pobre de mi”.

a rising star
It is in the visit of 1939 when he is struck by a girl who had revealed herself as the Rising Star of the CMQ-Radio Circuit, and who at that time was doing a little of everything at said station: she sang, declaimed, took turns speaking. She is called Xiomara Fernández; she is 21 years old and is as beautiful as she is shy. Gaspar Pumarejo, who would be the pioneer of television in Cuba, presents them. They haven’t exchanged more than a few words when Lara expresses her desire to write a song for her to release. Xiomara doesn’t know what to answer, she is speechless. She feels small before a composer like the one she has in front of her, but, finally, with many doubts, she agrees. Lara writes for her When you looked at me, which Xiomara premieres at the Gran Teatro de La Habana –today, Alicia Alonso- accompanied on the piano by the composer himself. He will sing it later in Matanzas and in Pinar del Rio.

“All the glory was mine / when you looked at me, / all the glory was mine / when you looked at me, / the day was without light, / everything was without light / and my life began / when you looked at me… ”.

Xiomara Fernández would remember many years later that she was always fascinated by Agustín; he was very fine and delicate, she said. Every day she sent a bouquet of flowers to the CMQ. She was afraid that such kindness would draw her attention and she would arouse suspicion among her classmates and she let him know. He then began to send you a single flower every day with a card that read “Thinking of you”.

They met several times in one of the bars of the Sevilla hotel. Lara told her about taking her to Mexico for work plans, and she specified that she could go in the company of a relative. Xiomara was not interested in the trip. Lara then went deep and proposed to her. She rejected it.

She continued Xiomara an ascending career and did not take long to start a courtship with José Antonio Alonso, the disputed host of the Supreme Court, the man of a thousand brides, as the press of the time called him. The wedding was quite an event. They got married on December 1, 1940, in the Great Theater of Havana, with the room full of radio listeners and people from the show business. Hundreds of admirers waited outside to see and acclaim the couple, including a pilot who landed his plane on the Paseo del Prado, in front of the theater building, to release pigeons and deliver a bouquet of flowers to the bride.

Lara’s music remains in the repertoire of Cuban singers of all times, inside and outside the Island.

The album Only once from Cuba to Lara collects the interpretations of great voices that sing it Cuban style. Pablo Milanés performs Noche de ronda, and Omara Portuondo, Only once, while the Aragón orchestra performs Lamento jorocho, and Francisco Céspedes vocalizes Travel Gift, at the express request of one of the composer’s ex-wives. Also on the plate are Van Van, Miriam Ramos, Kelvis Ochoa, Carlos Varela, Santiago Feliú and David Torrens, among others.

“Lara has been part of his lives, some grew up with him and everyone has adopted him as if he were Cuban,” said the Mexican producer of that album.

At the time, the interpretations made separately by Arráncame la vida, Orlando Contreras and Abelardo Barroso, who sang better as he got older, were highly celebrated. Memorable are those of Pecado, by Blanca Rosa Gil and the one made by Barbarito Diez de Palmeras. They like El organillero, by the Aragón orchestra, Rival, by the América orchestra, and Amor de mis amores, by Elena Burke. The interpretation that Roberto Sánchez and the Gloria Matancera orchestra made of Santa, the melody that Lara preferred among the more than 700 that she created, is kept alive in the memory.

He said of himself: “I’m ridiculously cheesy, and I love it. Because mine is a sincerity that others shy away from… ridiculously.”

Agustín Lara Aguirre y Pino, “El Flaco de Oro”, has his monument on Avenida del Puerto, on the shore of Havana Bay. A bronze statue, the work of the Yucatecan sculptor Humberto Peraza, which evokes the presence of the composer among us. The image highlights the extreme thinness of the artist who wears a jacket and tie. His left hand rests on his right arm while his right hand is raised to his face to hint at the presence of a cigarette that he will bring to his lips.

And it is that the author of the operetta The Golden Bird and of so much music for the cinema, incessant smoker in life, now smokes in eternity.

They say that they were obliged to have all their children procreated, because between the precepts of religions and the cost of an interruption of pregnancy, not even thinking about an abortion.

They say that in a family when deciding the children who would go to school, the boys were chosen, because the females were needed in the house.

They say that working women represented 17 percent of the active labor population and received a significantly lower salary than men for a similar job.

They say that there was no woman in Parliament, and -among many other truths- that prostitution was a consequence of the economic and social environment of the so-called “weaker sex”.

After 1959, when the triumphant Revolution began to make decisions, the lives of Cuban women took a 180-degree turn, and for some 360.

Just one year after the revolutionary victory, on August 23, 1960, the Federation of Cuban Women, FMC, was created, led by a young woman who had broken with almost all the molds in which they tried to put women.

It was Vilma Espín Guillois, an educated woman, a university student, a warrior against the government dictatorship on the plains and in the mountains. That lady dressed as a soldier to defend all Cubans, and especially women, one of the most oppressed sectors of society.

Since its inception, the women’s organization had the unconditional support of the highest levels of government, where surely not a few, with important responsibilities, doubted the ability of women to assume the roles performed by men.

They were also limited to the role of “housewife” and according to research at the time, women were the majority among the more than 800,000 illiterate people at that time.

Then job offers began to open up for women, courses in home economics, cutting and sewing, the opportunity to become literate, to become a university student, appeared, all without paying a penny.

Currently, according to the 2020 Yearbook, 2021 edition, of the National Statistics and Information Office (ONEI), women represent 39.3 percent of the country’s economically active population, of which the majority work in Public Health and Social Assistance and Education, with 357 thousand and 325 thousand workers, respectively.

Today, Cuba is the second of the five countries in the world that reach the gender parity classification in Parliament.

According to a report recently released by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), the five nations that achieve gender parity or a higher proportion of women in their lower or single chamber in 2022 are: Rwanda (61.3%), Cuba (53 .4%) and Nicaragua (51.7%) that occupy the first three positions, respectively; while Mexico (50%) and the United Arab Emirates (50%) share the fourth seat, at the end of June this year.

Since 1960, the year in which the organization known as FMC emerged, it was affirmed that for women in Cuba, a Revolution was taking place within the Revolution, and so it was, it was clearly seen how, step by step, the female sector was advancing, without displacing the men, but shoulder to shoulder with them.

As we have already said, there was the hand of Vilma Espín presiding over the FMC, a hand shaken and supported by the leader Fidel Castro, who in his efforts to remove the yoke from the enslaved, distinguished and defended women.

Fidel was not unaware of the smallest detail of women’s domestic life, in one of his speeches in 1960 he stated: “We must also study all the problems of Cuban women, we must study the problems of women who have to work and have nowhere to leave their children. Until now the creches are insufficient”

And the Children’s Circles, the semi-boarding schools, the internal scholarships, and other modalities arose to facilitate the education and feeding of the children, while their mothers worked.

In short, the opportunity of the right to life, to health, to education, to employment, to technical and cultural improvement, to access to management positions, to vote, to elect and be elected, was opened to women. to protect their reproductive and sexual rights, and family planning, among others.

It is not idle to remember that in 1961 the first Night Schools for Improvement for Domestics were created (fundamentally referring to the so-called “maids” who worked in domestic service), in which women received classes from literacy to sixth grade, with classrooms for cutting and sewing, shorthand and typing.

A motoring course began with 1,440 female students, contributed to Popular Transport with more than 1,000 drivers; and the special course for office work, which began with 1,100 students, employed 1,078 girls in bank agencies, ministries and state-owned companies.

That is why the first years of changes, prostitution was eradicated. The census that was being carried out in the Literacy Campaign was used to census women and other people in prostitution centers. Many stated their desire to learn a trade to work and get out of that “life”, others were offered schools to train them; all received a medical check-up with free treatment.

“Before the revolutionary triumph, tens of thousands of women were in this terrible situation, prostituted because of the economic situation. We thought that eradicating prostitution was going to be a long and difficult task. So it was a surprise for everyone that it disappeared as a social evil in less than two years,” Fidel said in a speech.

62 years have passed, and the world is no longer the same, nor are Cuban women, even today severe limitations are detected due to the reproduction of traditional models of behavior in all sectors, which are transmitted through formal and informal education, which is valid to measure attitudes in the modification of codes, relations between genders, and their social projection. This shows that, despite the structural and subjective barriers in gender relations being broken down, other subjective obstacles still remain that hinder integration.

But if we women see what we were, what we meant then and we look at ourselves today, the difference is enormous.

For those who are unaware of the trajectory of Cuban women, who did not take advantage of their history classes, did not have good teachers, or did not receive true women’s traditions from their families, it is impossible to assess what the Revolution has meant for Cuban women.

Sometimes we hear young people and not so young people say that in this country they don’t have opportunities, etc. etc. etc., and we think they are unfair, but they are not. They are ignorant of the history of their country, or have lost their memory among so many ups and downs experienced by this people where the woman -despite EVERYTHING- continues to carry the load and the reins of the home, she continues to be the rudder, the trunk, the family guide.

If we put any woman of our ancestry on one side and place ourselves on the other, we would have to say without fear of being wrong: Thank you Fidel, Thank you Vilma, for having made us people capable of deciding our destinies, for or against. , but whatever decision we make, we owe it to you.

(By Susana Tesoro/Cubadebate)

Statue of Eusebio Leal at the entrance of the Palacio de los Capitanes Generales, currently the Museo de la Ciudad. Photo: Ariel Cecilio Lemus

“Death is not true when the work of life has been well accomplished.” The words of Cuba’s National Hero José Martí can be said about so many great men and women, but they mold around Leal as if they werewritten for him. His work was so vast, so beautiful, that, as Magda Resik, director of Communications of the Office of the City Historian and vice president of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba, said: “When men forget him, the stones will still remember him.”

But they don’t forget him. How can they when he breathes on every cobblestone of the Wooden Street, greets from every square, turns every corner of the Historic Center, in his blue and gray clothes, walks to the City Museum and sits on his favorite bench in the inner courtyard?

There have been many tributes to his figure, from the plaque in the courtyard of the former Palace of the Captains General, the life-size statue at the entrance of the Palace, to the dedication of each event that the Office of the Historian has organized since 2020.

Rutas y Andares, a cultural program for the summer months devised by himself two decades ago, also pays tribute to him. Tras la ruta de Eusebio Leal (Following Eusebio Leal’s route) began last year with tremendous popularity. This August the invitation returns to explore a different facet of the historian’s personality and work every Saturday.

Leal collector, Leal cultural manager, Leal archaeologist and Leal y Roig are the names of the Routes that for four weeks will take the public through some of the sites where he worked, where he regularly went to supervise the works under restoration and many other sites that exhibit today the pieces that he collected with so much love over the years for his eternal bride, this city.

During the celebration of Havana’s 500 years, a visibly more tired than usual Leal told the guests that the 500 was over, that as of November 17 they would start working on the 501st.

This is, then, the best way to remember him, to work tirelessly to preserve what was achieved and continue to grow; so that Havana, ust like him, will never die.

(Taken from Granma)