Cuba

The Basque community of Cuba today is, above all, the Asociación Vasco-Navarra de La Habana: a society from 1877 that came close to disappearing and that between 2008 and 2017 went from just over 280 members to 554.

It reached the twenty-first century at a very bad moment, with serious problems in the way it ran, and some took its closure for granted. In 2002 María Teresa Cornide took over the presidency, with the aim of reviving it. In 2008 it had just over 280 members, nearly all of them from Havana and the surrounding area.⁸

In the meantime recognition had come. The Basque Government recognised it in February 2006,³¹³ and in July of that year a team sent by the Basque Government itself digitised the association’s historical archive in Havana.³

The new stage began in mid-2012, when Renato García Egusquiza became its president. The following year it had 370 members, had started a Basque language course and was looking for premises of its own;⁹ in 2015 there were 499.¹⁰ In July 2017 it celebrated its 140th anniversary with 554 members, 22 of them born in the Basque Country and 149 direct descendants with Spanish nationality, and marked it with a Basque week of cinema, talks, an exhibition and the Arima dance group.⁵

The island also drew researchers. In January 2015 Havana hosted the XI Seminario Internacional “Euskal Herria Mugaz Gaindi” (eleventh International Seminar), devoted to the Basque presence in Cuba and organised by the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno, and the Basque Government, with the collaboration of the association.¹¹

Relations between institutions went back further. Lehendakari José Antonio Ardanza travelled to Cuba in June 1997 and returned in September 1998 to open an office of SPRI, the Basque industrial promotion agency, in Havana. On both trips he met Fidel Castro.³

In 2005 there were 237 citizens of the Basque Autonomous Community living in Cuba who were on the electoral roll.³ They are Basque citizens, not descendants.

This portal’s register of centres lists 1 recognised body in Cuba, the Asociación Vasco Navarra de Beneficencia, on the Paseo de Martí (Prado).¹³