De Clouet’s parents would be children or most likely unborn. The first colonization projects around Jagua Bay would take a few years, but the Spanish Crown had already decided to fortify the entrance to the Little Caribbean Gulf, a natural haven from corsairs.
The fort responsible for protecting Spanish power in these borders of the island’s south coast was under construction at the time of this story in December 1743. Two years later, the military engineer Joseph Tantete added the completed work on the system defenses of the Pearl of the Antilles.
There are very few written records of the time that elapsed between Father Bartolomé de Las Casas’ brief stay in this region (mid-second decade of the 16th century) and the founding of Villa Fernandina (1819). It is paradoxical that a gift from Mother Nature like Jagua Bay was not the seat of a modern population until 1819. Which is not synonymous with the absence of people scattered around the water pocket.
A cartoon written in late 1958 by the Cienfuegos journalist Raúl Ugarriza describes the surroundings of the construction of the Castle of Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles in the last month of 1743. Brushstrokes with retouching of oral legends responsible for the narrative, more Two centuries later, the atmosphere of Christmas celebrations reigned, a festival that brought soldiers, builders and siege workers from Jagua into the camp around a table made of rough planks.
A few fattened pigs from the Candelaria sugar mill and plenty of wild fowl were the delicacies served at the feast, by the light of a lantern and several torches, on a large ranch built on the coast and just a few yards from the looming fortress. The commander of the garrison ordered a cask of Navarran wine to be opened to cheer up the celebration.
Like any story worth its salt, this one about Ugarriza was littered with a wide variety of characters. To what extent they were real or not is extremely difficult to ascertain on the other side of the fog of the nearly 28 past decades.
Of all, the chronicler highlighted Juanín, through whose veins flowed indigenous and Spanish blood. Apparently he lived in one of the Indian hamlets on the banks of the bay and was an expert in hunting matters. He always brought good pieces with him when he visited the construction workers’ camp and was given generous rations of Jamaican rum in return. The merry mestizo had the task of calling the families of the region to the celebration of Christmas in the Spaniards’ bayareque, a construction provided with a single wall of yaguas to protect themselves from the “Nortes”.
On the Hispanic side, the grace of Paquín and Luisa exceeded. He played the strings of the bandurria and she, a graceful Sevillian brunette, pounded out the “low cantín” the young man intoned.
Old Manolo disregarded the time every minute he boarded the ship that brought him from Spain. He didn’t even know about Christmas dinner because at the time he wanted to “sleep in” next to a boat stranded near the bonfire. They say he dreamed of his favorite tavern next to the Guadalquivir.
Pedro, the Mallorcan foreman, entertained the gathering of Creoles and Peninsulars with his nostalgia for Christmas, living in Las Palmas de Canaria, and an anonymous Galician longed for the dinners of the occasion in his village of Lugo.
The natives of Jagua brought guitars and accordions to the party and pounded away late into the night. On the morning of the 25th, all the devotees went to Luisa la Sevillana’s house and prayed before the image of Our Lady of the Angels and a painting of the Nativity.
Then everything returned to normal, stone by stone the fortress that is today the pride of Cienfuegos and the inhabitants of Cienfuegos continued to grow. And in the fertile lands of Jagua, the crops and farms.
