Hanabana

Hanábana was a rural district of southern Matanzas, on the low country that runs toward the Zapata swamps. Spanish settlers were active there before 1550, and in the later sixteenth century the Havana cabildo granted land for cattle raising in Hanábana and neighbouring districts. The district appears among the places receiving new settlers in 1566. By the late eighteenth century a small hamlet had formed around the local parish, with a cemetery and a cluster of inhabitants. The general register of 1778 counted two sugar mills in Hanábana, out of ten in the Matanzas jurisdiction. The landscape was uneven: livestock estates, scattered homesteads and early sugar production existed side by side.