Our Region

Throughout the 18th century, Guamutas continued to be the only population center in the area. Center of all economic and religious life, site of games and cockfights, and forced transit of people who were heading to Havana, came to obtain the status of Judicial Party in the next century. Its catholic wooden temple and tile roof, frequently visited by important personalities such as the Bishop of Triscaly, in 1778 registered a population of 600 inhabitants. Of these, small parts were slaves, but their rebellion was already manifested through the maroon. The first reference in this regard dates from 1777 when the Town hall of Havana, in response to the request of the rural owners, authorized commissions to prosecute the Maroons beaten in the nearby Heights of Bibanasí. 

The sugar industry reached the lands of Guamutas in the second half of this century. The Census of 1778 recorded the existence of a sugar factory on its premises. Six years later, three mills were grinding there, one of them in lagoon big (Pijuán). The development of sugar production in the area slowed down in its early years, as there were legal obstacles in the ownership of land and its commercialization. But when royal decrees were enforced in the 1810s, which allowed the sale and division to census of the haciendas of the territory in order to promote the production of sugar, new factories and cane fields emerged in our geography. In the harvest of 1834-1835 the Judicial Party of Guamutas counted 11 mills, and in later years the number continued to rise when the Regalado was founded in 1836 (after Álava and present-day Mexico), San Isidro (1837), Flor de Cuba (1838), Tinguaro in 1839 (later Sergio González) and others. 

In the first four decades of the nineteenth century, the sugar industry failed to supplant the role of livestock as a fundamental economic activity in the region. Livestock production benefited from the arrival of sugar, as its cattle were used as a means of transport, in agricultural work, and as a source of food for the provision of slaves and workers free of the mills. This explains that in 1831 the Judicial Party of Guamutas will have 216 cattle ranches. 

With the promotion of sugar mills and plantations, the population of the territory increased, mainly the slave. In the Guamutas Party itself lived in 1831, 2,275 slaves. Years ago, slaves from the area, in a gesture of rebellion and love of freedom, supported the abolitionist conspiracy of José Antonio Aponte, which extended from Havana to Guamutas, acquiring a certain development. 

The independence ideals of the suns and rays the Bolívar conspiracy movement also reached Guamutas. In this place one of his chief leaders, priest Domingo Hernández, deported to Spain in 1824. 

In the final years of this period there was a fact of great socio-economic significance for the town: the foundation of a population center that after having adopted the name New Bermeja, became the current city of Columbus. Columbus owes its origin to the sugar development, and other factors such as the excellent geographical position of the site where it was built, junction of the roads that crossed the region from North to South and from East to West, and certain social needs of the people there they settled, such as having a nearby place to buy food and clothes, pay taxes, fulfill religious duties, etc. 

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