Fire Fire Museum: Memories and Footprints of Battles against Fire

This August 5, three years were completed from the beginning of one of the most nefarious fires in the history of Cuba: that of the SuperTanqueros Base of Matanzas. That fire, which took a week to control, claimed the life of 17 firefighters who went there to fight the flames.

The tragedy, still fresh in the memory of the Cubans, was remembered again this week in the tribute to the fallen, many of them very young. In the tribute they were deposited flowers and lit candles before the Virgen de los Desamparados, at the “Enrique Estrada” Fire Barracks of the Matancera city, where the evocation of the victims is kept alive.

Flowers, tears and candles lit by the victims of the fire in the Superanqueros base

The Matancero Museum is not, however, the only place where the memory of those tragic events emerges. They are also the Super -Manager base itself, which three years later has failed to recover from what happened, and another museum, a hundred kilometers west, where other stories and battles of battles against fire are also treasured.

We talk about the National Museum of the Fire Department of Cuba, in Havana. Located in the old Charles Magoon Fire Barracks, in the central Zulueta street, the historic building currently keeps as part of its collection remains of some media used to combat the terrible fire in Matanzas and finally succumbed to the flames.

The Fire Barracks – from now on a museum and should not be confused with the Fire Hall of the Historic Center, located on Mercaderes Street – was inaugurated on January 17, 1909. Its opening, in times of second military intervention of the United States in Cuba, was chaired by the American governor Charles Magoon, from whom he would take the name.

During the republican period, the magonon endowment demonstrated its capacity and value in the extinction of the main fires that occurred in those years in Havana. Among them are remembered those of Tabaquería Suárez Muria, in 1922; that of the old town hall of Guanabacoa, in 1934; and that of the Belot refinery, today Ñico López refinery, in 1948.

Already in the 1960s, the barracks was renamed as martyrs of the Cerep, one of the great fires that its firefighters fought in those years, next to those of stores such as the time, the Ten Cent de Monte and El Encanto. In addition, at that time the Fire Formation School also worked there and the first rescue and rescue brigade was created.

The barracks remained in operation until 2008, when it was decided to restore it and turn it into the museum that is today. From its reopening as such, it exhibits equipment, vehicles, uniforms, helmets and other objects used in the confrontation of fires, landslides and other disasters, as well as photos and printed information about the history and heroism of Cuban firefighters.

We bring this historic building we bring him this Sunday through the images of our photoreporter Otmaro Rodríguez. We do it as a tribute to the fallen three years ago in the base of super -tanks and all those who have delivered their life fighting the flames.