Hello primos, Last week I made one of those rare ‘discoveries’ that one rarely experiences but that happen sufficiently frequent to keep some of us ‘hooked on doing research’. I am referring to a report which appeared in the Spanish Newspaper El Siglo Futuro (The Future Century) published in Madrid on April 5, 1888. I found it in the ‘hemerotecadigital’ section of the Biblioteca Nacional de Espanna (National Library of Spain). This is the link: hemerotecadigital.bne.es/issue.vm?id=0000121209 You can imagine my amazement when in the second page, in the fifth column approximately one third down the page, I came across a detailed description of the fire that consumed Don José Vidaillet’s coconut oil factory on Sunday, April 1, 1888. Sadly, it was no April’s Fool Day joke. This was place where family oral legend tells that Don José generously employed the frail elderly and people with physical disabilities who were not sufficiently strong to do other jobs. Apparently people with such impairments who could not do other jobs, could support their families at his coconut factory for the work was not as demanding. While I had always know that ‘La Fundadora’ was one of the major industries in the area, I did not know that had burned down or that news of the fire made it ‘literally half-way around the world’. For those who do not read Spanish, the news from Cuba seem to get to Spain ‘through the US’ via telegraph. The story describes on a Sunday, after all the bills had been paid for the week and the usual weekly cleaning had taken place, Don José was by then having lunch at noon in the dining room in his house when he saw smoke coming from his factory and rush there right away to try to put the fire out. When he got there, he found some of his employees who lived at the factory trying to extinguish the fire but their effort had proved unsuccessful. There is a passage where Don José is said to have tried hard to get the ‘bomba del municipio’ out of the large burning building but could not do so. In this context, I think the ‘‘bomba del municipio’ refers to what we would not call the ‘City’s fire truck’ which had just been repaired at his factory.
Posted on: Thu, 30 Jan 2014 05:07:20 +0000
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