It happened that when the neocolonial Republic just started, on May 20th, 1902, in the middle of the process of Yankee occupation of Cuba and after the celebrations on the occasion of the event that took place in the city of Puerto Príncipe, —in which Amalia Simoni raised the national flag to replace the one with the stars and stripes -, the directive of the Popular Society of Santa Cecilia would place in the very center of the Old Main Square a stone on which the monumental complex and equestrian statue would be raised to honor El Mayor, Ignacio Agramonte Loynaz.
Such an event of sublime and altruistic ideological content, after so many years confirms to us how much devotion the people of Camagüey continued to feel for their eponymous hero.
Later, on March 10th, 1903, when the Provincial Organization and Regime Law was proclaimed, it would be recognized that the province constituted the set of municipal areas located in its demarcation and the Cuban national territory; that the law would extend its scope to said terms through a Council and a Provincial Governor.
Therefore, in that month and year, the Council, having listened to the popular sentiment and that of its members, would agree to officially change the name of the province of Puerto Príncipe, and with this of its municipal seat, still with a whiff Hispanic for some, because of the ancestral aruaco origin of Camagüey, which had been conquered and colonized through force by a foreign nation.
The decision made by the government headed by the local patrician and former General of the Liberation Army Lope Recio Loynaz was brave and just, whose resolution also supported the citizens who would read the agreement with joy on the newspapers of Las Dos Repúblicas and El Camagüeyano.
It is worth noting that Camagüey had just come out of the War of Independence, in 1898, and the context could not be more favorable for this and other structural, social, political and cultural changes.
The revolutionary cultural agreement, also endorsed by the Territorial Council of Veterans of Independence, came to put an end to a painful colonialist practice of invisibility, silence and discrimination to which human contributors to the regional ethnos had been subjected for centuries and, truly, the first to settle our territory and even fight with rustic weapons to resist barbarism and the Spanish armed and cultural superiority.
Certainly, it was those original inhabitants of our island-archipelago who imposed their cultural and religious practices, their original languages and their place names on spaces and places until then of geographic silence until leaving them culturally marked forever, which today are recognizable to us: Camujiro, Jimaguayú , Guáimaro, Sibanicú, Caonao, Ytabo, Ymias, Saramaguacán, Maraguán, Hatibonico, Tínima …
There is no doubt that that original voice that seemed muffled, would once again gain resonances in new contexts and objects, this time a sugar mill, a stream, a rural road, a country estate, a factory, the local soul … And what about Camagüey would not come from «Cagüax», the cacique linked to Hatuey who went out to ambush the Hispanic army and killed Captain Narváez in Yucayo, in the vicinity of Caunao, according to Velázquez’s words to King Fernando, in April 1514?
Because of everything, Camagüey must be intoned with a certain emphasis, it is easily assumed by our current language, and that voice passes into our imagination; and because it comes to preside over all the acts and paths of our present and future history, it defends by its essence and with its diverse and invisible attributes the value of the regional ethnos of Camagüey, which no other foreign cultural superiority will be able to supplant or make invisible.
Translated by: Aileen Álvarez García
