The old Camagüey: historical review

by Manuel Villabella

Camagüey not only is distinguished for its very autochthonous architectural characteristics, there is a feature that it feels to each step and that it also identifies us: the daily speak. These peculiarities in saying come from previous centuries and they took root, fundamentally, in the XIX century.

Even nowadays we use the archaic “abur” when saying goodbye, frequently transformed into the diminutive “aburito”. This way the “goodbye” was substituted and the archaic “agur” of the Spanish Middle Ages was become into a local expression of Camaguey. To the homemade recipient, used nowadays to freeze the water and to transform it in ice, some called him “artena”, a copy perhaps of the “trough”, recipient where the barbers prepared the lather for shaving.

In architecture, we are practically inventors, in the XIX century, of the mid pilasters that are observed still in the facades of old colonial mansions, they are those columns that are split in the middle and they don't join to the floor, also of the “dust cover”, that eaves who stands out of the houses and due to them we wonder: From what dust did them really cover us? The entrance step of the houses is the “hinge” and those that had a considerable height and wide able to sit down the family to refresh in the hot afternoons or nights, they denominated them “platforms”.

Those who inhabited the periphery of the city, called marginal, they were named “Indians” and those areas were denominated “suburbs”, in a vulgar way. It is well-known the characteristic shout from Camagüey. The “vos” and the “vos sabéis”, they proliferated per centuries and people included them in its vocabulary and adapted it to its way of popular slang, the “vosabeí” was born this way, among other terms that became peculiar.

Which was the cause for these archaisms proliferated? The jurisdiction of Puerto Príncipe, distant of the sea, it also lacked terrestrial communication with the rest of the island. The city possessed a particular geographical unit. Puerto Príncipe opened up to the rest of the island, with the arrival of the railroad, in the middle of the XIX century, but for that time town expressions and words were already very marked in the form of speaking.