Close to fulfilling the 150th anniversary of receiving the title of Villa from the Spanish Crown, an event that occurred on the first day of December 1870, the inhabitants of our city can be proud that, due to the effort, diligence and ingenuity of their predecessors, Guantánamo counted in 1858 with its railroad, long before neighboring Santiago de Cuba had this technological advance.
On November 13, 1837, the first of these iron roads (Havana-Bejucal) was inaugurated in Cuba, the seventh built in the world and the first in Latin America, according to researchers Oscar Zanetti and Alejandro García, in their work Roads for Sugar .
That locomotive that slid along the parallels of the capital's Ciénaga workshops to a distant town 27.3 kilometers marked an economic-industrial event reported for the first time in 1825, in England, which was followed by the United States, France, Germany, Belgium and Russia.
With the application of this technological advance, our country anticipated Spain, the metropolis, by 11 years, which had its first iron road in 1848, between Barcelona and Mataró.
The second section in the Greater Antilla was built in the Upper East, almost a thousand kilometers east of the capital, surpassing this region in precedence over Santiago de Cuba and other more populated towns in the archipelago.
It was to be supposed that the privilege now deservedly called Cradle of the Revolution would be credited, but eight months before the authorities of that city requested its railway concession, a group of farmers from Guantanamo had traveled to Havana for the same purpose.
Spurred on by the need to ship their productions and by the reorientation of their economy, after the coffee crisis, the owners of Guaso had set up a port in Cerro Guayabo, a coastal area of the bay, near the mouth of our Guaso River.
But the 10 kilometers between the new pier and the hamlet of Santa Catalina, current city of Guantánamo, were flat and clayey terrain, impassable in times of rain, and the only solution to get around them was the railroad.
The central figure of the promoter group was the English merchant Tomás Brook, the main sugar merchant in the region, whose important firm operated from Havana and Santiago de Cuba, with the large sugar importers in the United States.
When the concession was granted, on August 24, 1855, the works of the most eastern and second-born railway in Cuba began and passed quickly, thanks to the “noble” topography, facilitating a simple route devoid of curves and slopes. but they did not link to the unhealthy port of Cerro Guayabo, but to that of Caimanera, 20 kilometers away.
In 1858 that railway line was completed and anyone who consults the extensive bibliography on the subject will make sure that the first section of Santiago - Boniato was extended until the following year, the most difficult part of the Santiago railway line, and then, in 1860, the from Boniato al Cristo, until reaching Dos Caminos (current municipality of San Luis), in 1861.
This is a paradigm of how, in a vital issue for the development of a region, all the provincial capitals, except Havana, lagged behind this city that is currently preparing, amid the inconveniences of COVID-19 and the intensification of the economic, commercial and financial blockade of the United States, to celebrate its "150" of having a title recognizing the worth of its neighbors, which 12 years before that granting had proven their worth, with the acquisition of this advance technician, guarantor of an almost irreplaceable link between city and country.
By Pablo Soroa
Photos from the author's archive and courtesy of Ladislao Carvajal
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