Reconstruction of Bayamo, the Torch City

“From the entrance of the town to the desolate Park, the city was a pile of rubble (…) over which an endless flock of pigeons flew, tracing circles in the air and without daring to land on them, as if trying to find, through the shapeless blackened mass, the places where they left their offspring, the safe haven of their nests!”

Thus historian José Maceo Verdecia described in his book Bayamo “the horrifying but severe and imposing view” that welcomed the Count of Valmaseda on January 18, 1869 as he entered Cuba’s first free town, which the residents had heroically set on fire a few days earlier.

The fire had short- and long-term effects on the architectural structure and layout of the second town founded by Spain in Cuba, according to Idelmis Mari Aguilera, a specialist with the Center for Historical and Socio-Cultural Research Casa de la Nacionalidad Cubana whose book Fuego y Ocaso holds that on top of the said damage came the earthquakes of 1624 and 1776 and, therefore, exodus and reconstruction marked the evolution of the region between the late 19th and the early 20th centuries.

Thus today’s Bayamo, Granma province’s capital city since 1976, rose phoenix-like from the ashes to become a new and luring town, albeit not without many obstacles, overcome thanks to the resilience of its inhabitants.

With its mixture of styles and periods in the history of art and architecture, the well-named Torch City boasted a predominance of eclecticism in the first half of the 20th century, as well as elements of art nouveau, art deco, neo-colonial, pro-rationalist, rationalist and post-modernist constructions alongside colonial buildings that survived the patriotic flames, such as the chapel of the San Salvador Church and the birthplace of the Father of the Homeland Carlos Manuel de Céspedes.

The so-called Special Period of the 1990s put a stop to the said efforts and made it necessary to resort to alternative construction techniques, but the 21st century brought with it a new stage of development as hundreds of houses were built despite the permanent and currently intensified U.S. blockade of Cuba and the impact of COVID-19. However, construction work in the National Monument City does not stop as its children keep the mason's buckets active.