Our Region

The farmhouse or paddock was built on a cavalry ground from the Bermeja estate, donated by the Biscayan Martín José Zozaya. More than altruism and civilization, the gesture of its owner allowed him to earn money from the matter through the auction of the plots for sale. The cavalry, almost swampy site, was divided into 115 lots, leaving a cloth of earth for the church and another for the cemetery. This donation was made official on August 8, 1836, date that the Colombians have considered as the foundation of their city. In its first years of life new Bermeja, name that received the settlement to differentiate it from another existing in the current municipality of Unión de Reyes, grew slowly and arbitrarily, in the absence of a computer and land regulator plan donated by Zozaya. Bohíos and humble little houses were built on both sides of the Royal road (after Concha Street), or scattered nearby. However, in 1837 he owned a hermitage, and a year later, burials began in his first cemetery. 

The main economic legacy of the municipality of Colón to the history of Cuba is its sugar cane tradition. High yields of the cane, the technological modernity of more than a hundred mills, among them the Álava (today Mexico), pioneer in the use of the steam engine with three-hub mill and condenser, and the excessive exploitation of thousands of African and Chinese slaves hired by the sacrament made the insular sugar emporium from 1850 to 1880. 

The profits contributed by the sugar, the cattle ranch, the commerce, the coffee and the tobacco in the plain propitiated in December of 1855 the birth of a jurisdiction of 3 470 square kilometers called Columbus, at the proposal of the artemiseño scientist Tranquilino Sandalio de Noda, for to honor the Admiral who led in 1492 the encounter between European culture and American culture. From that moment the Cuartón Nueva Bermeja lost its name, in the official documents it began to be called Colón, head of the jurisdiction, and all its inhabitants adopted the gentilicio of Colombians. 

In its time of economic splendor the territory had the largest slave population of African origin (33 699 people) and contracted Chinese (9 758 people), being Julián de Zulueta owner of the Álava, Habana and Vizcaya mills, one of the promoters of human traffic to solve the need for arms in plantations and factories. They starred in acts of rebellion such as fugitive. In the Ponina sugar mill, the endowment of Chinese rebelled on August 28, 1861; the largest of the Asians in the country, broke their working instruments and part of the machinery, and killed the mayoral, his wife and daughter. 

The territory was one of the main scenarios in the use of incendiary tea as a method of struggle for the destruction of its sugar wealth, the main economic support of colonialism. It was put into practice by Henry M. Reeve (El Inglesito), Carlos Roloff, Carlos Agüero, Francisco Pérez, several local parties of insurgents, and Generals Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo in their invading passage through the plain, on December 21, 1895

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