(p. A9) This small town on Cuba’s northern coast is steeped in memory and wistfulness, a kind of living monument to the intertwined histories of the United States and Cuba and to the successes and failures of Fidel Castro’s social revolution.
The town dates to 1916, when Milton S. Hershey, the American chocolate baron, visited Cuba for the first time and decided to buy sugar plantations and mills on the island to supply his growing chocolate empire in Pennsylvania. On land east of Havana, he built a large sugar refinery and an adjoining village — a model town like his creation in Hershey, Pa. — to house his workers and their families.
He named the place Hershey.
The village would come to include about 160 homes — the most elegant made of stone, the more modest of wooden planks — built along a grid of streets and each with tidy yards and front porches in the style common in the growing suburbs of the United States. It also had a public school, a medical clinic, shops, a movie theater, a golf course, social clubs and a baseball stadium where a Hershey-sponsored team played its home games, residents said.
The factory became one of the most productive sugar refineries in the country, if not in all of Latin America, and the village was the envy of surrounding towns, which lacked the standard of living that Mr. Hershey bestowed on his namesake settlement.
. . .
“I’m a Fidelista, entirely in favor of the revolution,” declared Meraldo Nojas Sutil, 78, who moved to Hershey when he was 11 and worked in the plant during the 1960s and ’70s. “But slowly the town is deteriorating.”
Many residents do not hesitate to draw a contrast between the current state of the town and the way that it looked when “Mr. Hershey,” as he is invariably called here, was the boss.
Residents seem amused by, if not proud of, the ties to the United States.
Most still use the village’s original name, pronounced locally as “AIR-see.” And Hershey signs still hang at the town’s train station, a romantic nod to a bygone era, though perhaps also a symbol of hope that the past — at least, certain aspects of it — will again become the present.
For the full story, see:
KIRK SEMPLE. “CAMILO CIENFUEGOS JOURNAL; Past Is Bittersweet in Cuban Town That Hershey Built.” The New York Times (Thurs., DEC. 7, 2016): A9.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date DEC. 7, 2016, and has the title “CAMILO CIENFUEGOS JOURNAL; In Cuban Town That Hershey Built, Memories Both Bitter and Sweet.”)