Matanzas

Matanzas was founded on 12 October 1693 as San Carlos y San Severino de Matanzas, after a royal decree of 1690 ordered that the bay be settled by 30 families from the Canary Islands. The name means "massacres", and local tradition ties it to an episode in 1510 when Spanish soldiers crossing one of the rivers were overturned by Indigenous fishermen and most of them drowned — described by the city's historian as the first act of Indigenous rebellion in Cuba. The town grew up where three rivers, the Yumurí, the San Juan and the Canímar, run into the bay.

In the 19th century the plains around the city were turned over to sugar, and enslaved Africans were brought in to work the plantations. In 1792 they were about 30 per cent of the population of Matanzas; by 1841 they were 62.7 per cent. The area saw several slave risings and plots, among them the Escalera conspiracy discovered in late 1843, which was followed by a year of savage repression. During the sugar boom the city's poets earned it the name Athens of Cuba, and the Sauto theatre opened in 1863.

On 25 April 1898 American warships bombarded Matanzas, the first action of the Spanish–American War. In the 20th century the Hershey company built an electric railway to carry sugar to the port of Havana. In August 2022 an explosion and fire at the city's oil storage base forced the evacuation of about 4,900 people and shut the local power station.

Matanzas is known as the birthplace of danzón and rumba. Danzón, the stately couple dance long treated as Cuba's national dance, became a distinct genre by 1879, when Miguel Faílde's Las alturas de Simpson — named after a neighbourhood of the city — was first performed here. Rumba grew in the second half of the 19th century among Afro-Cuban workers in the poor neighbourhoods of Havana and Matanzas, and the city's Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, formed in 1952 as the Conjunto Guaguancó Matancero, are among the most acclaimed rumba groups of all time. The group Afrocuba is another local name, and the mambo bandleader Dámaso Pérez Prado was born here.

Because so many enslaved and free Afro-Cubans lived in Matanzas, African traditions survived especially strongly. Santería is widely practised, and the city even has a Lucumí name, Ayá Áta. Drumming, song and ritual are part of neighbourhood life.

The city also keeps its literary reputation. The Sauto theatre still stages plays, opera, ballet and concerts, and Ediciones Vigía, founded in 1985 on the Plaza de la Vigía, has become known abroad for its handmade, hand-coloured books, a collection of which is held by the British Library.

About 164,000 people lived in the municipality of Matanzas at the 2022 count, spread over the city's four traditional neighbourhoods — Versalles, Matanzas, Playa and Pueblo Nuevo — and the outlying barrios. As the provincial capital it has the province's government offices, the University of Matanzas, a working port and oil installations around the bay.

Many people in the city work in tourism without working in Matanzas at all: a large share of the hotel staff of Varadero live here and travel along the coast each day, and a job with access to tips in foreign currency is one of the most valued in Cuba. Sugar, once the base of the economy, has shrunk as mills have closed.

Daily life follows the national pattern of low state wages, rationing, queues and long power cuts, and the province has lost many young people to emigration. The 2022 fire at the oil base, which knocked out the local power station, deepened the city's energy troubles. Even so, life is lived outdoors — on doorsteps, in the squares and on the bridges — and the music that made the city's name is still played in homes and neighbourhood halls.

Matanzas eats the Cuban staples: rice and black beans, often cooked together as congrí, roast and fried pork, chicken, yuca with mojo, a garlic and citrus dressing, and fried plantain, both as savoury tostones and sweet maduros. Along the coast there is fish, and casabe, a flat cassava bread with Taíno roots, is still made in parts of the countryside. Ingredients are often limited by the shortages, so menus change with what can be found.

Much of the cooking visitors eat is done in casas particulares, whose hosts serve breakfast and dinner, or in small private paladares and state cafés around the old centre. Guarapo, freshly pressed sugar-cane juice, is sold at stands in the cane country, and strong sweet coffee punctuates the day.

The province has a place in the history of rum: in nearby Cárdenas the Arechabala company launched Havana Club in 1934, and rum from the region's cane underpins the mojitos and Cuba libres served along the coast. In the city itself the cafés around the Sauto theatre are the classic places to sit over a coffee or a beer and watch the square.