These two monuments date from two very different post-revolutionary eras, but they are equally identified with Matanzas, a province whose name literally commemorates its decimated native populations’ experience with Spanish colonialism: massacre. The early twentieth-century statue of José Martí, flanked by a female ‘Cuba Libre’ [Free Cuba] breaking her shackles, stands in the middle of the city’s central plaza, announcing the link between Cuba’s struggle for freedom from Spain and the abolition of slavery. These street signs, announcing one’s arrival to Matanzas, reflect the government’s baffling decision in 2010 to create a whole new province out of the rural areas of Havana, now called Mayabeque and named after a river, Cuba’s southernmost watershed. (July 2016)
