Asociación Vasco Navarra de Beneficencia

The Asociación Vasco Navarra de Beneficencia in Havana was founded in 1877 as a charitable society for Basques and Navarrese, and it is still open. On 26 February that year the colonial authorities authorised the meeting to found it, and in July it was constituted: together with the Laurak Bat of Buenos Aires, from the same year, it is one of the first Basque associations in the Americas. Unlike the Laurak Bat, it admitted Basques from the other side of the Pyrenees from the start; in 1883 it had 610 members, 15 of them French Basques. In the Colón Cemetery it has the society's own mausoleum, Laurac Bat, inaugurated in 1902. It reached the twenty-first century almost closed, and with María Teresa Cornide as president from 2002 and Renato García Egusquiza from 2012 it grew from just over 280 members in 2008 to 554 in 2017, when it celebrated its 140th anniversary; the Basque Government had recognised it on 7 February 2006.