By: Desiderio Borroto Jr.

In the middle of the principeña savannah, on a smooth plateau that stretched out like an open eye imprisoned by the river and surrounded by watchful hills, almost in the very center of the Hato de Guáimaro, arose the town of the same name, a toponymic of aboriginal heritage, later adopted by that of the conquering herd.

It was the year 1791. The church built by the Franciscan friar Gregorio de Jesús Caballero y Miranda marked the point of expansion. Those who then lived in that conglomerate made up of partitioner owners of the herd, hunters and country people were going, without knowing it, to be witnesses of an event of transcendence: the founding act of a population of which they would be protagonists.

On Sunday, February 10th, 1791, from the bell still mounted on a gallows, the priest of the Franciscan order, Fray Gregorio de Jesús Caballero y Miranda, called the parishioners to the temple. There would be mass, and he was also going to perform a baptism. With that sacramental act, he was preparing to open the first baptismal book for white and Spanish people from La Purísima Concepción de Guáimaro Church.

That’s how he made it. That day he baptized, put oil and chrism on a boy he named Andrés María Millán y de la Cruz. With this founding act, all those born from now on in that eye of the savannah, would form part of their own identity, different from the rest of those existing in the region, they would be Guaimareños.

It germinated there, in that historic moment, the pride and honor of those born in this town, the pride and honor of being Guaimareño. Because the first book of baptisms is open and Fray Gregorio de Jesús Caballero has carried out the first baptism, in an emancipatory action -instituting the initial legal document that accredits it- that is the date taken as the date of the Foundation of the town of Guáimaro, and its founder is considered to be Fray Gregorio de Jesús Caballero y Miranda.

Guáimaro, the town founded on that Sunday, February 10th, 1791, fused its history to the coordinates of the History of the Homeland and here Joaquín de Agüero conceived some of his reform projects, consolidated his desire for independence and very close to the town and supported by several of its inhabitants tried to make them come true.

In Guáimaro, Cuban unity was forged and the Republic of Cuba in Arms sprang from the mambí impetus. The Apostle José Martí, in his article April 10th, published that day in 1892 in the newspaper Patria -in profound and sublime prose- defines Guáimaro, the town where the Constituent Assembly that formed the Cuban Republic was held and where its inhabitants In an act of patriotic sacrifice, they set their houses on fire to give the enemy: “ashes where fortresses awaited, like a sacred town and a holy city.”

This sacred town and holy city meets this February 10th, 233 years of foundation; and its inhabitants breathe the pure air of the savannah and live in the swirling daily events of this time.

Translated by: Aileen Álvarez García