Cuba - Lonely Planet [178]
The compact old town is sandwiched between the Río Yumurí and the Río San Juan with the historic Versalles quarter situated to the north. Most of the industry is east of Versalles. The Hershey Railway terminates in Versalles, but all other transport facilities are south of the Río San Juan.
The streets of Matanzas suffer from a capricious numbering system. In the old town the north–south streets bear even numbers, beginning at Calle 268 near the bay. The east–west streets increase from Calle 75 at the Yumurí bridge (Puente de la Concordia) to Calle 97 along the banks of the San Juan.
Matanzas residents just ignore these arbitrary numbers and continue using the old colonial street names. However, in this chapter we have used the numbers because that’s what you’ll see on street corners (see below).
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MATANZAS STREET NAMES
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Information
BOOKSTORES
Librería Viet Nam (Map; Calle 85 No 28612; 9am-5pm Mon-Fri, 10am-2pm Sat)
INTERNET ACCESS & TELEPHONE
Etecsa Telepunto (Map; cnr Calles 83 & 282; per hr CUC$6; 8:30am-7:30pm)
LIBRARIES
Biblioteca Gener y Del Monte (Map; 24-41-34; Calles 79 & 290; 8:30am-10pm Mon-Fri, 8:30am- 3:30pm Sat, 8:30am-12:30pm Sun) Appropriately for the ‘Athens of Cuba’ this is one of the oldest libraries on the island (1835), housed in the former Casino Español.
MEDICAL SERVICES
Servimed ( 25-31-70; Hospital Faustino Pérez, Carretera Central Km 101) Clinic just southwest of town.
MONEY
Banco Financiero Internacional (Map; 25-34-00; cnr Calles 85 & 298)
Bandec (Map; 24-27-81; Calle 85 No 28604 btwn Calles 286 & 288)
Cadeca (Map; 25-35-58; Calle 286 btwn Calles 83 & 85; 8am-6pm Mon-Sat, 8am-noon Sun) Two portable kiosks here behind the cathedral.
POST
Post office (Map; Calle 85 No 28813; 24hr) On the corner of Calle 290.
Sights & Activities
IN TOWN
If you’ve only got time to see one bridge (there are 21 in total) in Cuba’s celebrated ‘city of bridges,’ get an eye-full of Puente Calixto García, an impressive steel structure built in 1899 that spans the Río San Juan and leads directly into Plaza de la Vigía (Map). This diminutive square was where Matanzas was founded in the late 17th century and numerous historic buildings still stand guard.
On the southeastern corner, the Matanzas fire brigade is headquartered in the 1897 neoclassical Parque de los Bomberos (Map),
which poses as a museum but will only take a couple of minutes of your time. Across the street is Ediciones Vigía (Map; 24-48-45; 8am-4pm Mon-Fri), a unique book publisher, founded in 1985, that produces handmade paper and first-edition books on a variety of topics. The books are typed, stenciled and pasted in editions of 200 copies. Visitors are welcome in the workshop and you can purchase numbered and signed copies (from CUC$5 to CUC$15 each). Next door is the rather scant Galería de Arte Provincial (Map; Calle 272 btwn Calles 85 & 91; admission CUC$1; 10am-2pm Mon, 10am-6pm Tue-Sat).
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CABILDOS
Matanzas has played a unique balancing act in the development of Cuban culture. Dubbed the ‘Athens of Cuba’ in the mid-19th century for its abundance of poets and writers, the city’s erudite white intellectuals obscured an underlying ‘African-ness,’ a cultural force that found expression in the roots music of rumba and the mysterious cabildos that helped to shape it.
Afro-Cuban cabildos trace their origins back to the beginning of the colonial period when African slaves of similar ethnic backgrounds formed ‘brotherhoods’ that came together on feast days to worship the orishas (deities) and keep their ancient traditions alive.
These loose social organizations imitated the Masonic lodges and mutual aid societies of the ruling colonizers, and were widely encouraged by Spanish authorities who used them as a means of subjugating a potentially restless slave underclass.
By the mid-19th century there were an estimated 100 different cabildos in Cuba incorporating enslaved and freed blacks from the same African ‘nations.’ In the 1920s, Cuban scholar