{ "id": "ferrocarril-de-la-habana-a-guines", "type": "entity", "name": "The Havana–Güines railway (1834-1842), the first railway built in the Spanish world", "summary": "A forty-five-mile line from Havana to the sugar town of Güines, ordered by the crown in 1834, paid for with a two-million-peso loan raised in London by a colonial development board, opened in sections from 1837 and sold to a private company in 1842. The board's own printed accounts carry both columns: the school, the chemistry chair and the railway on one side; the hunting of runaway slaves, and 3,744 day-wages of its own enslaved men left out of the road's cost, on the other.", "locale": "en", "tags": [ "americas", "cuba", "caribbean", "engineering", "transport", "infrastructure", "institutions", "nineteenth-century", "slavery", "spanish-empire" ], "relations": [ { "rel": "related", "target": "coartacion" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "reglamento-de-esclavos-de-cuba-1842" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "correos-de-las-indias" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "reglamento-de-comercio-libre-1778" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "gremios-de-artesanos-de-nueva-espana" } ], "questions": [ "What was the first railway built in the Spanish empire?", "When was the Havana to Güines railway built?", "How was the first railway in Latin America paid for?", "Who built the Havana–Güines railway and who worked on it?", "What did the Real Junta de Fomento of Havana spend its money on?" ], "claims": [ { "id": "c1", "text": "A Spanish compilation of colonial legislation printed in Madrid in 1845 opens its article FERROCARRILES by describing the forty-five-mile line from Havana to the town of Güines as the undertaking of \"el primer camino de hierro realizado en posesiones españolas\" — the first railway carried out in Spanish possessions — and dates its impulse to a royal order of 12 October 1834 addressed to the intendant of Havana in his capacity as president of the junta de fomento.", "sources": [ "zamora-biblioteca-ultramarina-1845-tomo-di" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c2", "text": "The motive is on the record in the crown's own words, and it is commercial rather than philanthropic. The royal order transmits the Queen Regent's confirmation of the agreements of the junta de fomento de agricultura y comercio for a railway joining the capital with Güines, \"á fin de aumentar la riqueza pública, abaratar el precio de las conducciones, proporcionar salida con menos coste á los frutos sobrantes, y evitar ó disminuir la competencia extranjera\" — to increase public wealth, cheapen carriage, give the surplus crops a cheaper way out, and avoid or diminish foreign competition.", "sources": [ "zamora-biblioteca-ultramarina-1845-tomo-di" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c3", "text": "The same order authorised the board to contract in England a loan of two million pesos fuertes, mortgaging for its payment not the royal revenues but the board's own — the one per cent levied on imports at Havana and three cuartillos elsewhere in the island — together with the road's earnings, and fixing a sinking fund of not less than 40,000 pesos a year. The loan was negotiated in London on 18 October 1834 at 75 per cent, so that a nominal two million left 1,649,998 pesos 3 reales after a discount of 549,999 pesos 3 reales, at six per cent annual interest, with a Mr A. Robertson as paid agent; a second loan of half a million followed on 16 October 1837 at a discount of 148,483 pesos 3 reales.", "sources": [ "zamora-biblioteca-ultramarina-1845-tomo-di" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c4", "text": "The directing commission's report separated the financing losses from the engineering. Of a gross charge of 3,459,850 pesos 4½ reales it assigned 1,280,237 pesos 5½ reales to the discount on the loans and interest paid, and put the true cost of construction, with complete depots and an organised motive power, at 2,005,478 pesos 6½ reales — 44,566 pesos a mile, or under 42,000 a mile if the 3½ miles of sidings are counted with the 45 of main line. The earthworks behind those figures are itemised as 519,227 cubic yards of excavation in earth and rock, 483,814 cubic yards of embankment and 7,531 cubic yards of masonry and ashlar.", "sources": [ "zamora-biblioteca-ultramarina-1845-tomo-di" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c5", "text": "It was run as a public service with published rules before it was sold. From 1 May 1839 a regulation for the instruction of the employees of the Havana–Güines railway came into force, with annexed tariffs of reduced freights and an arrangement for the running of trains at fixed hours, approved by the board on 10 April 1839 and ordered to be printed and circulated; the last section was finished at the end of 1839, carrying the line to the gates of the city on lots of the botanical garden bought from the royal treasury.", "sources": [ "zamora-biblioteca-ultramarina-1845-tomo-di" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c6", "text": "The state then sold it. At a public auction of 11 January 1842, after more than two years of delay caused by a contest between two rival companies known as that of the many and that of the few, the railway was adjudicated with all its appurtenances for 3,669,127 pesos 6 reales, of which 169,127 pesos 6 reales were for the botanical-garden lots. The buyer took over 2,615,382 pesos owed to the English creditors at six per cent, paid the remaining 1,053,745 pesos 6 reales to the board and the treasury in graduated instalments without any interest, and undertook to cut fares by 17 per cent in first and second class, 34 in third and 50 for troops, and to build branches to Batabanó, San Antonio and the district of Los Palos.", "sources": [ "zamora-biblioteca-ultramarina-1845-tomo-di" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c7", "text": "Its effect claimed at the time was demonstrative rather than monopolistic: the great difficulties of this \"primer ensayo\" once overcome, the practicability of railways in the island and their immense utility were held to be proved and the spirit of enterprise diffused, and to that diffusion the compilation attributes the lines of Cárdenas, Nuevitas, Júcaro and Sabanilla, built by private associations under individual direction.", "sources": [ "zamora-biblioteca-ultramarina-1845-tomo-di" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c8", "text": "An independent and foreign witness confirms the primacy and the chronology from the other side of the trade. A New York commercial monthly of 1860, reprinting a Havana paper, calls the line from that city to Güines, by then extended to La Unión, \"the first ever constructed\", says it was commenced in November 1835, dates the Cárdenas–Macagua line to 1838 and the Júcaro railroad to 1839, and states that all the others were traced and begun after 1840. The two sources are not in conflict on the dates: the royal authorisation and the London loan belong to 1834, the beginning of the works to 1835.", "sources": [ "hunt-merchants-magazine-1860-cuba-railroads", "zamora-biblioteca-ultramarina-1845-tomo-di" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c9", "text": "By 1860 the same American source counted 27 lines finished or under construction in Cuba, about 818 English miles in all, of which at least 500 were in operation, with 17,027,414 dollars 66 cents invested and receipts of 3,386,840 dollars in 1858. The figure it prints in kilometres, 1,315,522, is inconsistent with the 818 miles it gives in the same sentence and is treated here as a misprint.", "sources": [ "hunt-merchants-magazine-1860-cuba-railroads" ], "confidence": 0.75 }, { "id": "c10", "text": "The board's report is triumphalist and the object records the boast as a boast. In fifty years of spending all its revenues, it writes, the corporation had got no further than Marianao, three leagues from the city, by stone roads; in four years it had put seventeen leagues of railway into public use, already yielding more than a thousand pesos a day. And at what sacrifices, it asks, and answers itself: at none. The glory is attributed by name to the \"genio infatigable del conde de Villanueva\", the intendant who presided over the board.", "sources": [ "zamora-biblioteca-ultramarina-1845-tomo-di" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c11", "text": "The claim of no sacrifice is refuted eighty pages later in the same volume by the board's own balance sheet. A note to the table of the Real Junta de Fomento's income explains that a levy collected from January 1833 was to reimburse the junta consular 12,449 pesos 5 reales advanced for the Güines road to the landing place and wharf, \"sin hacer cuenta de 3.744 de jornales de negros de la corporación\" — without counting 3,744 day-wages of the corporation's own black workers. The labour of enslaved men owned by the corporation was spent on the work and was explicitly left out of its cost.", "sources": [ "zamora-biblioteca-ultramarina-1845-tomo-di" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c12", "text": "The same statement of outgoings for the fifty-four months from January 1835 to 30 June 1839 prints, in adjacent columns of one table totalling 717,138 pesos, what the corporation that built the first railway in the Spanish world also paid for: 55,706 pesos 4 reales for the \"captura de cimarrones y cuadrillas contra apalencados\", the capture of runaway slaves and the squads sent against maroon settlements, beside 27,733 pesos 1 real for the nautical and primary school, 16,835 pesos 4 reales for the chair and laboratory of chemistry, 15,878 pesos 4 reales for the patriotic society and 3,885 pesos for the conservatory of arts. The table is printed sideways and its figures were read from the scan, which is why this claim is not carried higher.", "sources": [ "zamora-biblioteca-ultramarina-1845-tomo-di" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c13", "text": "Neither source is the archive. The 1845 volume is a compiler's alphabetical digest of ultramarine legislation which quotes royal orders, the directing commission's printed report of 15 April 1839 and the board's own states, but is not the originals and is written by a colonial official for colonial officials; the 1860 magazine is an American commercial review reprinting a Havana newspaper's account of its own island's progress. Both are treated as secondary here and the object's tier follows the weaker of them.", "sources": [ "zamora-biblioteca-ultramarina-1845-tomo-di", "hunt-merchants-magazine-1860-cuba-railroads" ], "confidence": 0.9 } ], "takeaways": [], "faqs": [], "evidence_tier": "secondary", "evidence": { "level": "industry_observation", "source_types": [ "paper" ] }, "moat_flag": false, "winning_edge": "English coverage of this line is a date and a superlative — \"Cuba had the first railway in Latin America, before Spain itself\" — with no documents under it and no account of who paid or who dug. This object puts the printed machinery on the page: the royal order of 12 October 1834 and the commercial motive it states in its own words, the London loan at 75 with the discount named, the engineering cost separated from the financing loss at 44,566 pesos a mile, the 519,227 cubic yards of excavation, the timetable and tariff regulation of 1839, the auction price of 1842 with the fare cuts written into it — and then, out of the same board's balance sheet, the 3,744 day-wages of its enslaved men that the road's cost was calculated without, and the 55,706 pesos it spent hunting runaways in the same years it paid for a chemistry laboratory. The achievement and its price from one set of accounts.", "confidence": 0.8, "last_verified": "2026-08-14", "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/ferrocarril-de-la-habana-a-guines", "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/ferrocarril-de-la-habana-a-guines.json", "jsonld": { "@context": "https://schema.org", "name": "The Havana–Güines railway (1834-1842), the first railway built in the Spanish world", "description": "A forty-five-mile line from Havana to the sugar town of Güines, ordered by the crown in 1834, paid for with a two-million-peso loan raised in London by a colonial development board, opened in sections from 1837 and sold to a private company in 1842. The board's own printed accounts carry both columns: the school, the chemistry chair and the railway on one side; the hunting of runaway slaves, and 3,744 day-wages of its own enslaved men left out of the road's cost, on the other.", "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/ferrocarril-de-la-habana-a-guines", "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html", "dateModified": "2026-08-14", "citation": [ { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Biblioteca de legislación ultramarina en forma de diccionario alfabético, the volume covering D-I", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=m-LJ2bewEjwC&pg=PA237" }, { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "\"Railroads in Cuba\", in the Railroad, Canal, and Steamboat Statistics department of The Merchants' Magazine and Commercial Review, p. 112", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=1f8cAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA112" } ], "@type": "Article", "headline": "The Havana–Güines railway (1834-1842), the first railway built in the Spanish world" } }