Founded in 1847 as a rural outpost that saw minor growth when soldiers from the Trocha settled in the area, Ciego de Avila is a relatively new city for Cuba. The region only began to flourish in the early twentieth century, after Cuba had won independence from Spain. The main reason was caña de azucar, “sugarcane,” the mainstay of the island’s economy since the late eighteenth century and the primary source of the wealth that had built the colonial cities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as Matanzas, Trinidad, Camagüey, and Cienfuegos, as well as the imposing baroque and
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