Caribbean nations have much in common: they are extroverted, dynamic, and multicultural. They share attachment to the unbridled rhythms, seasoned and spices hot meals, tanned by the sun, the salt of a gentle and fierce sea at the same time, the humidity of the jungle. Being a woman or a man of the Caribbean is, without doubt, an attitude towards life. Therefore, this attitude not only contains tangible reasons for its existence, but wraps it all: how to walk, to gesture, to say, how to dream and rebel, the musicality of its poets, the charm of native myths, Africans and Europeans, the baggy clothing and fresh fabrics. And it is this last element, the dressing, in which there is a piece that will unite nearly all the inhabitants of the region: the guayabera.
Its history dates back to the eighteenth century, when the Andalusian immigrants Jose Perez Rodriguez and Garcia Nunez Incarnation reached the town of Sancti Spiritus, in south central Cuba and about four kilometers from Havana. Joselillo was a potter man and after three months of being settled in the city he already had his own workshop in the banks of Yayabo River, around which the city was built almost five hundred years ago. Orality reveals that after receiving a piece of fabric sent by their families from Granada, Spain, the man asks his wife to make long shirts with big pockets on the sides, to keep the tobacco and some tools of the workshop . Thus the controversial legend of the guayabera enters the world. The story of Joselillo and Encarnacion was taken as a starting point with some variants that differ on whether the garment was established on the island or have been already brought by the immigrants, but the truth is that from immemorial time the guayabera has remained in the ascendancy of Cubans as their garment's identity, along with the Cuban dressing gown. According to journalist Ciro Bianchi Ross “there is no documentation to support its birth in the land of Yayabo. But it is fair to say right away that there is no documentation to the contrary and that no other Cuban region has discussed to Sancti Spiritus the paternity of the garment. The early yayabera spread to the neighboring provinces, and was trochana in Ciego de Avila and Camaguey in Camaguey, without losing the stamp printed by the people from Sancti Spiritus. "
The guayabera became popular in Cuba during the presidency of General José Miguel Gómez (1908-1912), who was a native of Sancti Spiritus, and was legitimized as phrase in the Cuban vocabulary of Constantino Suarez published in 1921. The garment reached its maximum utilization during the government of Ramon Grau San Martin (1944-1948), who was so devoted to the outfit that got to turn it into a court dress. There were reactions against the excessive informality of the official ceremonies. A prestigious female society, the Lyceum, even organized in 1948 a symposium on the use and abuse of the guayabera and financed the recording of the guaracha “Cero guayabera”, popularized by Daniel Santos with the Sonora Matancera.
In spite of those vicissitudes, the now famous shirt continued to gain space in the preference of Cubans, especially among farmers, ranchers and Republican politicians. It is from the late forties of the twentieth century and early fifties that the use of the guayabera transcends the borders of the island, it reached Broadway in New York, Central America, Mexico, and the Philippines and was even seen in Korea. A report in the Havana Information newspaper in 1948 read: "... The President of the United States, Harry S. Truman, who is resting in Key West, Florida, after being elected president of his country, acquired some guayaberas, as the one he worn to meet the vice president-elect ... ". On the other hand, it was the clothing worn by the Yucatan upper class, who bought it in the store El Encanto in their frequent trips to Havana.
In the late fifties, the garment loses value when making with not only yarn fabrics, which was the original fabric and begin to make them with cotton, designs are simplified, other colors are accepted, the sleeves are not always long, and mother of pearl buttons are replaced by plastic.
With the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the guayabera disappears from public places and government. For the new rulers was a symbol of bourgeois politicians. The uniform of the National Militias began to be used for all daily tasks, from a wedding to a funeral. In the late seventies and after nearly twenty years of absence from the closets shirts branded Yumurí appeared in domestic markets. But it is a timid comeback that puts aside yarn and cotton, which are replaced by polyester.
In 1979, at the Sixth Summit of Non-Aligned Countries, held at the Palace of Conventions in Havana, attendees found that gastronomics, conference officers, porters and all the security personnel and services wore the same guayabera that delegates and guests.
It was not until the celebration in the early nineties of the past century in Cartagena, the Ibero-American Summit that the shirt created on the banks of Yayabo, resurfaces in the eyes of the nation in an unexpected way. The then President Fidel Castro put aside his symbolic olive green uniform and for the first time in the history of the Cuban Revolution he flooded television screens around the world wearing the guayabera, in what many agree was a bombshell after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the inevitable decision of the country to look back to its natural environment: Latin America and the Caribbean.
Heritage restoration of the guayabera
With all these upheavals in its history, in 2007 a group of artists and intellectuals of the city of Sancti Spiritus undertake what in the eyes of time we might call the "restoration of the guayabera" as their most important intangible heritage. To reverse that reality The Guayabera sociocultural project is created.
It initially covered the entire population of Sancti Spiritus, while it was proposed to lead a revival of cultural offers diversifying the options, for which the garment was used as well as everything regarding local national identity and defense of values it symbolizes.
Guayabera collection, which has been built from the beginning by pieces donated by their owners or heirs, has maintained throughout this time the presence of the cultural life of the city into the focus of national interest and in the eyes of the world, starting from the fact of matching parts of men and women on foot and personalities that are part of the contemporary history of Cuba and elsewhere.
A key element in this process of restoration since 2009 is the inclusion of a giant guayabera in the ritual carnival city, known as Santiago Espirituano to be dedicated to St. James. On July 25 of that year -date held since early last century the Guayabera Day and the Day of Absent Espirituano, a guayabera made of canvas of three meters wide for five long appeared on the streets of the town; it was made by the craftsman Fidel Diaz. As uniqueness, the garment has a label the shield of the city - from 1959, created by the plastic artist Julio Neyra. The guayabera began its journey -carried by the hands of the residents of the city in the central area of ??parades and floats, enters through the central boulevards and ends its journey in the central park, where the troubadours offer a serenade while is being brought in the old building of the Cultural Society El Progreso, today Provincial Library. There it stays until the afternoon of the next day, when it is removed and returned to its exhibit space in the current House of Guayabera, which can be seen the rest of the year.
La Casa de la Guayabera, in its attachment to the heritage restoration of the garment, so Cuban and Caribbean, proposes the collective benefit, a better quality of life, human development from all points of view, with emphasis in the creative sector because that is where the cultural heritage is born. Is our community who has defined what its heritage is and more: what its value is.
