Havana Cuba. — On October 12, 1693, the city of San Carlos and San Severino de Matanzas, in western Cuba, was founded. Bathed by the Yumurí, Canímar and San Juan rivers, its birth was marked by the need to protect the bay, a regular target of corsair and pirate attacks. The need to fortify the commercial belt to prevent the adventurers from appropriating such an important enclave led the King of Spain, Carlos II, to order the city to be built, which was carried out through a mass officiated by Bishop Diego Evelino de Compostela and the then Interim Governor, Severino de Manzaneda.
Conceived as a city and not as a simple town, it responds to the political-military principles of the Renaissance period, and to the urgent need to protect the capital from enemy attacks. The castle of San Severino, one of the great military buildings in Cuba, testifies to the importance conferred on Matanzas, the first city in the country erected under the explicit will of the state in the documents issued by the King of Spain.
Also known as the “City of Bridges” it showed a vigorous development from the 19th century with the introduction of the printing press, and stood out in almost all sectors of the economy: energy, industry, commerce, livestock and agricultural production, especially the sugar cane cultivation. It is considered that the year 1813 marked the beginning of the Golden Age of Matanzas, whose economic and cultural boom would continue to rise to the point that, in 1860, it was publicly baptized as “The Athens of Cuba”, an epithet that its inhabitants have maintained. proudly to this day.
Among his illustrious children stand out the writer and playwright José Jacinto Milanés, Professor Miguel Teurbe Tolón, who designed the coat of arms and the flag of Cuba based on an idea of the patriot Narcissus Lopez; as well as the musicians Dámaso Pérez Prado, Arsenio Rodríguez and Carlos Manuel Alfonso “Caíto”, percussionist and founder of the legendary Sonora Matancera.
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