Cuba

The Basques of Cuba organised early and to help one another: their first associations, in Matanzas and in Havana, were benevolent societies, and the Havana one, founded in 1877, is still open. In the twentieth century they were joined by a Basque centre and, after the Spanish Civil War, a Delegation of the Basque Government in exile that lasted until the Revolution.

Matanzas, 1868

According to the Basque Government, the first Basque association in America of which there is documented record would be the Sociedad de Beneficencia de naturales y descendientes de las Provincias Vasco-Navarras de Matanzas. The historian Cecilia Arrozarena dates its founding to 1868, with reference to the Archivo Histórico Provincial de Matanzas. It operated until at least 1891; after that, the Basques of Matanzas joined the branches of the Havana association.³

The Asociación Vasco-Navarra de Beneficencia (1877)

On 26 February 1877 the colonial authorities authorised a group of Basques and Navarrese to meet in order to found a benevolent association. The Asociación Vasco-Navarra de Beneficencia was formally constituted in July of that year.⁵ Together with the Laurak Bat of Buenos Aires, from the same year, it is one of the first in America,³ and it did not stay in the capital: it had members in Cienfuegos, San Antonio de los Baños, Matanzas, Sagua la Grande and other towns.³

In 1883 there were 610 of them, mostly from Bizkaia, followed by people from Gipuzkoa and Navarre.⁶ Among them were Basques from the other side of the Pyrenees, and that set it apart. The Laurak Bat of Buenos Aires admitted only Basques from Spain and their descendants; the Havana association accepted French Basques from the start, 15 in 1883 and 18 over the course of the nineties. That is why the historian Jon Ander Ramos has called it “the first American zazpirak bat”.⁶

The association also looked after its dead. In the Colón cemetery it has a society mausoleum, Laurac Bat, which was inaugurated in 1902, with the coming of the Republic.⁵⁷

Other bodies followed. In 1911 the Centro Euskaro, later the Centro Vasco, was born in Havana,³ and the weekly Laurac-Bat was published in the city until the middle of the twentieth century.⁷

The exile: the Basque Delegation in Havana (1939-1958)

The Basque Government opened an official Delegation in Cuba very early on. In 1939 it appointed José Luis de Garay as delegate, and he held the post until the end.⁴ He arrived in a divided community. The Cuban press had mostly taken Franco’s side, and the president of the Centro Vasco, Jesús Azqueta, from Gipuzkoa, made no secret of his anti-Republican sympathies. The change came after the visit of lehendakari (president of the Basque Government) Aguirre in 1942: in January 1943 the board was renewed and the nationalist Francisco Saralegui became president of the centre, with Azqueta as a collaborator.⁴

The Delegations in the Antilles were placed under the one in New York.⁴ Even so, the Havana Delegation won an unexpected success in 1947: the Cuban Senate allowed the Basque delegate, along with representatives of other groups of the Republican exile, to have a voice in the UN General Assembly within Cuba’s delegation. In March 1950 Aguirre and Jesús de Galíndez stopped over in Havana, and there they were received by the delegate Garay and the president of the Centro Vasco, Saralegui.⁴ In the fifties the instability of the country reduced the Delegation’s activity, and the triumph of the Revolution brought it to an end.⁴