Omaja is a small town and ''consejo popular'' of the municipality of

Majibacoa Majibacoa is a municipality and town in the Las Tunas Province of Cuba. The municipal seat is located in the town of Calixto, immediately east of Las Tunas, the provincial capital. Demographics In 2004, the municipality of Majibacoa had a popul ...

Cuba Cuba ( , ), officially the Republic of Cuba ( es, República de Cuba, links=no ), is an island country comprising the island of Cuba, as well as Isla de la Juventud and several minor archipelagos. Cuba is located where the northern Caribbea ...

. It is located in the eastern part of the province, 50 kilometers southwest of

Holguín Holguín () is a municipality and city in Cuba, and the capital of Province of Holguín. After Havana, Santiago de Cuba, and Camagüey, it is the fourth largest city in Cuba. History Before Columbus, the Taino people settled in huts made fro ...

and 20 in the east of Las Tunas.

History

The land in the area was sold for a trifle by Lico López to American D. E. Kerr and his neocolonizing retinue. The town of Omaja was settled by American Methodists. In the year 1905, the Americans who had settled there, without wasting any time, began the construction of a town with the architecture of the

American west The Western United States (also called the American West, the Far West, and the West) is the region comprising the westernmost states of the United States. As American settlement in the U.S. expanded westward, the meaning of the term ''the Wes ...

. The streets were named after the men who bought them: Kreider, Frankbert, Blasser, etc. Unlike the majority of other towns in Cuba, Omaja has no Roman Catholic church or establishment, due to it remaining a small, Methodist town since its founding. However, in the past at least, there was a small population of Catholics who would have a monthly

mass Mass is an intrinsic property of a body. It was traditionally believed to be related to the quantity of matter in a physical body, until the discovery of the atom and particle physics. It was found that different atoms and different elementar ...

with a priest from another town. Between 1906 and 1909, just outside town was the Finnish Utopian community of Ponnistus. Founded by Oscar Norring, a merchant seaman, and William Keskinen. The community was mostly Finnish-American loggers, miners, and craftsmen. Norringhad been in the employ of the Buenvista Fruit Company and his vision for the community was as a citrus grove. Lack of water and poor connections to the railroad made the efforts difficult. Between 1909 and 1910, a section of the Central Railroad was finished. When the station was opened, the town was named ''Majibacoa'', but again the American prepotency prevailed and a new board with the name of Omaha appeared overnight - in allusion to a tribe of red skins - the Cubans rejected the interference and after several changes Omaja prevailed. The 1919 census reveals Omaja's population consisted of 2, 381 inhabitants, it had 13 trades, three hotels, a phone center, a silent cinema, two bakeries, two cemeteries (one for the Cubans and another for the Americans), a Ford agency, two saw-mills, and a shop of cabinetmakers. In 1920, the political violence between the conservatives and the liberals, and the bank moratorium put an end to the accomplished attempts of neo-colonization. In 1928, with the construction of the Central Highway, Omaja's decadence began to end. This happened because many of its inhabitants moved to Las Parras, Gastón, and Buenaventura in order to be closer to the highway.

References

External links

Omaja weather on accuweather.com

{dead link, date=March 2018 , bot=InternetArchiveBot , fix-attempted=yes Populated places in Las Tunas Province Populated places established in 1905 1905 establishments in Cuba

History

See also

References

External links