Mayarí stories

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BAHÍA DE NIPE 1827 ORIGINALMayarí: Name that may have Aruaco or Taíno origin. According to an old, unlikely legend, the first Spaniards arrived by the river and were accompanied by local Indians who insistently pointed out: -maya there, maya there! - that is, there were many Mayas ahead (Textile plant that is used only to limit rustic properties, because its leaves have spikes, and it develops easily in any terrain - Bromelia Antelminthica), said that warning with a mixture of its language and Spanish, what was heard by the conquerors translated into "Mayarí".

The naivety of this myth is not without an etymological basis if one takes into account that: maya, is an aboriginal word and rí or arí is also an aboriginal word, meaning river, that is, “river of the Mayas”… Where it is repeated throughout the Island in: Bitirí, Baitiquirí, Ariguanabo, Yumurí, Arimao, etc. Likewise, ari is a tooth in Aruaca languages ​​(the Mayan leaves are jagged, sharp, similar to teeth). And in the same aruaco ma means no, denying the existence of groups of people. Then then Mayarí would mean in Aruaca voice, "place where there are no teeth, there is no population." In the Taina language they say Mayaní that it is equivalent to Nada, which could be heard and interpreted as Mayarí, that is, that there was nothing, not even population in this remote region when the first aboriginal settlers arrived who were fleeing the Spanish conquest from the area of Holguín.
It is curious that this name appears in the mythology of the Philippine Islands that also have a meaning for Mayarí: Mayarí is a Deity, the moon, female, in the Tagalog religion.

In Tagalog mythology, Mayarí (also known as Bulan) is the beautiful lunar deity who was the daughter of Bathala, the King of the Gods, and a mortal woman. She is known as the most beautiful deity in the Court of Bathala. She is the sister of Tala, the Goddess of the stars, and Apolaki, the God of the Sun.

In the Pampangan myth: Bathala died without leaving a will and Apolaki and Mayarí fought for who was going to take over the land. Apolaki wanted to seize the land for himself, while Mayarí insisted on equal rights. The two fought the conflict with bamboo clubs, until Mayarí lost an eye. After Apolaki saw what she had done, she agreed that together they could rule the earth, but at different times. Mayarí began to rule at night, the light of Mayarí is dimmer (the Moon) due to the loss of her eye. Her brother Apolaki (Sun), ruled by day.

Oblivious to the Pampamgan myth, the first owner of the San Gregorio de Mayarí Abajo herd was named Bartolomé Sánchez Bahamontes, probably from Venezuela, great-grandfather of the former General Arcadio Leyte Vidal Delgado, the marble man planted in the park of our town, who began to exploit these lands around 1750 approximately. Bartolomé settled in the Pedrona area, there he built a Trapiche but the houses of the first settlements were scattered. Bartolomé married María de los Ángeles Díaz and with her he had a daughter, Gertrudis, who received this great inheritance and married the Santiago doctor Francisco Soria y Quiñones. Doña Gertrudis Sánchez Díaz conceived 4 children, (Rafael, Juan Neponusemo, María de los Ángeles and María Asención) The latter, María Asención Soria, married the First Assistant of the Plaza de Santiago with functions of Sergeant Major Don José Leyte Vidal Toledo, Arcadio's grandfather. When Don José became a widower, between him and Rafael, the older brother of the deceased, they bought the rights to the other two joint heirs, so Mayarí was divided between Rafael Soria (from the Guayabo stream to the South and from the Mayarí River to the East, that is, , Seboruco and Chavaleta) and Don José Leyte Vidal, obtained North and West (San Gregorio).

The town arises

The town of Mayarí was planned by Don José to rise up in Juan Vicente, but time and the death of this great entrepreneur, which occurred in 1849, erased the devastating overflows of the waters from the minds of the Mayarí people, so that it grew since the distant 1850 a long and winding hamlet, with a single street or Camino Real bordering the ravine of the Río Mayor. By 1858 it was already a more or less concentrated hamlet, that is why the Church was moved from El Cocal to the place it occupies today, a curate house, jail, a cemetery and an infantry barracks were built. Mayarí was born as a town.
In the colonial period, Mayarí had two stages of economic boom due to the warlike confrontations between Creoles and Spaniards. In the first stage, during the war of 1868, Mayarí gained somewhat in its rustic and urban wealth as a result of the concentration of forces at that point, which became an Army Brigade of operations. In 1878, at the end of the Ten Years' War, Mayarí was constituted as a Municipality (1879) with its first Mayor, Don Juan Grau, who took care, among other things, of building a dock in the Pontezuelo for river navigation through which they carried out all commercial operations, the only way of entry and exit with greater security. The first Mayor, as it was said, was Don Juan Grau and Pratt, followed by Don Faustino Braña - who tells a somewhat fantastic story of treasures about him - Don Juan Vinardell and Don Rosendo Torrens.

When the 1968 war ended, commercial activity diminished and, together with the poverty of its people, typhus, smallpox, cholera and the endemic malarial fever decimated its population. In the next war for Indep