One of the original spaces of the colonial Puerto Príncipe that has enjoyed the privilege of history is the Ermita Square and the Convent of San Francisco de Asís. It should be noted that from where the sun was rising, the “suburb” of poor people excluded from the oligarchic urban hub grew, which, as a bishop of the Island noted, in the seventeenth century, Indians, blacks and mestizos, lived there all mixed.
Unfortunately, the “Corojo neighborhood” would be attacked by pirates and years later told by the urchin Alexandre Esqueling, who we know that [Henry] Morgan had threatened the neighbors with setting fire to the neighborhood if they did not satisfy his demand for money and salty meats. Although some neighbors were scattered around the area in the face of the threat, most would remain to watch over the bones of their loved ones buried under the funerary crypt of the Franciscan convent.
The place would be occupied by the Piarist Fathers who would occupy the convent in the 19th century. The remodeling of the building would make the dungeon disappear, the tunnel sealed and the gunpowder deposit removed. Finally, the 20th century would see the front of the convent and the church tear down.
From May 1919 the church of the Sacred Heart would be erected there, a neo-Gothic work carried out by the architect Claudio Muns Piqué and the Catalan master builder Jaime Cruanyas Feliú. On its facade of the temple, the flared arch with archivolts of vegetal motifs shines. The interior of the temple is illuminated by means of the polychrome stained glass windows imported from Germany.
From “Palace” to Polyclinic
The commander of the Royal Order Isabel la Católica Lic. Tomás Pio Betancourt y Sánchez-Pereira, as no one else would have modified the San Francisco Square within the historic urban landscape of Puerto Príncipe, having his house built that would integrate other houses owned by family members, to form an apple. Due to the caliber of what was built, the building was named “Tomás Pio palace”, and in a somewhat ironic tone “house of half a million”; all covered by galleries upstairs and downstairs to serve as “a twenty-three yards long and six wide open room, very suitable for public activities that occur”, that is, to hold gatherings and enjoy the music of the San Fernando orchestra.
After the owner’s death, his daughter Dolores Betancourt y Agramonte would take over the house, from October 29th, 1890. Shortly after, due to the War of Independence in 1895, being in New York, on July 31st, 1916, when ordering her will, the woman from Camagüey arranged for the house to open as a School for Poor Girls and Boys ruled by the Salesian order.
So Dolores Betancourt, distant from her hometown that she knew was occupied by Spanish troops, she arranged for her assets to be used to help the boys and girls who could be the most harmed in that armed conflict. Upon her return to Camagüey, she must have known of insurgent relatives, and even assumed responsibility for the vaults of the Agramonte-Loynaz, Betancourt-Sánchez, the Loynaz-Caballero, the Castillo-Betancourt, and the pantheon where the bones of his mother sister rested, aunts of Mayor Ignacio Agramonte.
After various educational uses and in a marked process of deterioration that endangered its durability, and for all the values of the building inspired by the eclectic movement and the influence of the academicism of the first decades of the 20th century, moreover, of the few buildings with a vestibule of six semicircular arches that overlook the city squares, deserved its rehabilitation that was in charge of the Ecoin-8 Company and the Conservation and Restoration Company of the Office of the Historian. On Cuban Builders’ Day, December 5th, 2005, the civil works concluded. The “José Martí y Pérez” Teaching Polyclinic would soon begin to provide medical assistance services. With that, the city also honored the Master, because that had been the place that Pepito Martí walked by several time.
Translated by: Aileen Álvarez García
