Morón, Cuba
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Morón is one of ten municipalies in province Ciego de Ávila in Cuba. It's the second in importance and the oldest. It has about 63,000 inhabitants. The municipality stretchs a superficial extension of 615.1 km². Morón is the closest city to the tourist resorts on Cayo Coco and Cayo Guillermo.
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[edit] General Data
[edit] Geography
The municipality is located north to Ciego de Ávila city, limiting at east with Bolivia municipality, west with Chambas, the Caribbean sea to the north and to the south with the Ciro Redondo municipality. The terrain is mostly plain, with small hills to the north, made up of salt domos. The north shore is covered by marshes.
Morón has the greatest natural water mirror in Cuba, Laguna de la Leche, of 67.2 km².
The northern highway (Carretera del Norte) passes through the city; the main road from Ciego de Avila to Cayo Coco also skirts it. It's linked by railway too, to Ciego de Avila, and on the Santa Clara to Nuevitas line.
[edit] Economy
The main economic activities are agriculture and tourism.
[edit] History
The first residents of Morón were Creoles from Sancti Spiritus, although among them were also said to be a group of Spanish sailors who, having navigated all around Cuba, had disembarked nearby and had decided to settle here. They were from Andalusia, in Old Castile, Extremadura, Galicia and the Canary Islands, among other places.
In the first half of the 20th century, the archipelago and the nearby keys had attained little development. The town of Morón, which started as a community in 1750, survived on a basis of a limited, non-mechanized agricultural, and mosttly sugar, production. The settlement pattern that prevailed in the coastal areas and keys was that of squatters, people living in very poor, tach-roof, earth floor dwellings, usually not more than five houses together.
Making coal and fishing, in many cases both activities at the same time, were apparently the main economic activities on the keys and their surroundings. Fishing was mostly done by using dinghies moved by sticks, oars, or small sails, which did not allow them to venture out of the key shelf. This means were the ones used also to reach the mainland and to transport products out. In the settlements, livestock was mostly limited to a few animals. Still standing at some places are remains of the stone fences that were used to confine the animal.
Living conditions here were in general very difficult, due mostly to the remoteness of the area and the lack of proper means of transportation. Transportation consisted usually of a small sailboat that traveled back and forth once a month, and whose journey took many hours, Reaching the mainland from Cayo Coco, for example, took around 10 hours, in addition to the risks that had to be run at sea.
In the 1960s a road was built through the marshland to the coast, and in the 1990s this was extended on a man-made causeway to Cayo Coco and Cayo Guillermo, where a number of hotels were built. Many of the hotel workers live in Morón and commute to work in specially provided busses.
