Official name: Guantánamo
Guantánamo province population: 511, 224
Guantánamo city population: 208, 145

Guantánamo is an aborigine name that means “land beween rivers”. This region is detached by the preponderance of mountainous rural zones, and important basins like Guantánamo-Guaso and Toa River, the most copious in the country, they are also located the Cuchillas del Toa with an extension of 125000 hectares where is located la greatest  reserve of the biosphere because of its woody zones are the most important in the country.

Around the Guantánamo lands Admiral Cristobal Colón landed in 1492, the first Cuban Town (Baracoa) was founded by Diego Velanquez in 1511 and its territory resulted to be an important bastion during the independence wars. To this part of the island arrived many French colonist from Haiti, who in a short time improved cacao orchards, fruit areas and large plantation of coffee trees in mountainous zones, from whom we learned its agricultural culture and habits, very fixedly in the population at the present. In the Guantánamo province there are still traces of the native settlements in La Caridad de los Indios zone, at Manual Tames municipality, an aspect of great ethnic cultural interest.

Guantánamo is the most mountainous zone all around the archipelago and its soils are the most arid in the country, in its South region, but in the North where the rains are over the national average. Guantánamo is a province mainly agricultural, where the productions of coconut, salt and coffee are distinguished.

The North American capital started to interfere into the economy of Guantánamo at the end of the 20th Century, principally in the sugar industry, in the services and the jobs that the military enclavement at Naval Base in Guantánamo generated.

The Cuban Revolution triumph in 1959, marks the beginning of a deep socioal-economic transformation at the Guantánamo territory demonstrated by the disappearance of the great landocracy by means of the Agrarian Reform Law, the development of the public health and education, as  soon as the diversification of economic activities.

Guantanamo City Censures