Antecedents of the founding of the village
- Written by Collaborator Desiderio Borroto Fernandez
- Published in Historical Facts
The name of the village, Guaimaro corresponds to the indigenous voice with which aborigines named a tree that abounded where the city rises.
The Spaniards, after the conquest of the region continued to call the village in the same way. Around 1530 the aboriginal population was attacked by settlers who killed them and seized their wealth, the expedition was sent by the biggest encomendero of the Basque Island Porcallo de Figueroa.
The Indians of this area only bequeathed to the development of architecture the model of their rudimentary, fleeting huts and some techniques for using materials, by the complexion of the conquest, the lands that formerly belonged to these communities were spread in herds, sites and pens.
The local lands also ran that fate and so the first documentary reference to the herd of Guaimaro corresponds to 1627, when it was sold to Francisca Gonzalez, being the Stockbreeding the main economic sector, from this time began to settle in place large families on farms obtained through inheritance, purchase or as farmhands.
Then in the seventeenth century huts of palm leaves, wood and guano in isolation began to proliferate without speaking even of a well built village. Pedro Agustin Morell de Santa Cruz confirms this fact when in 1756 in his church visit to Puerto Principe he mentions that in this region existed the Thank God Parish or San Basilio where the priest Juan Salvador Rodriguez makes Mass in the huts of the haciendas because church has never existed.
In the second half of the eighteenth century a hermitage was built around which different houses were gathering from which no studies on their structural characteristics exists. The census conducted to the Party in 1778 informs the existence of 327 inhabitants and 100 houses distributed among 15 herds, 33 corrals, 52 sites and nine ranches so it is not possible to define how many were already clustered around the chapel and already formed a village.
At the end of this century the church "The Immaculate Conception" was finished, in this church the first baptism was held on February 10, 1791, this date was taken as the foundation of the city. About this early stage Antonio Perpignan noted in his book The Camagüey:
"... The population of Guaimaro was a small village of eight houses scattered with 50 inhabitants, when the church was built."