Guantánamo Civil Registry Records
Birth records of the Registro Civil of Guantánamo, starting with the very first book the civil registry kept there in January 1885. Each record names the child, the parents and all four grandparents where it gives them, with where each was from, whether they were living, and often their occupation and how the clerk described them. Every record opens on its scanned page, with the name marked. Each parent and grandparent also has a record of their own, with what the birth record says about them (where they were from, where they lived, their occupation), linked to the child and to the rest of the family.
What the records are
Spain's civil registry took effect in Cuba on 1 January 1885. From then on every birth in the villa of Guantánamo was declared before the Juzgado Municipal: the judge and his secretary wrote an entry in the birth book, with the hour and day of the birth, the house it took place in, the child's legitimacy, the parents and grandparents, and two witnesses. Before 1885 births appear only in parish baptism books.
The collection holds 421 birth records:
- Book 1 (Tomo 1), complete: 354 records, from the first entries of January 1885 into 1886.
- Acts from later books: 67 records from eleven other books (tomos 2 to 37), from 1886 to 1917.
The records show a town of many origins: families from Cataluña and the Canary Islands, French and Haitian families settled since the coffee era, Cubans from Santiago and the countryside, and grandmothers born in Africa. Race and legal condition are shown only where the record states them, in its own words ("Described as"), on the person the record gives them to.
How the records were read
The donated images are the registry's own scans of the books. Each record was read from the scan by two independent readers with the help of an OCR transcription, and every difference between them was settled from the image in a discussion between two further readers. Officials and witnesses who appear in many records (the judges Antonio Ureña y Núñez and Miguel Reynés y Homar, the secretaries Ernesto Reyna and Diego de León, and witnesses such as Miguel Martí and Pedro Moné) are each one person across the collection.
Where the readers could not settle a name or a date, the record keeps their best reading and says what is still under review. Text torn from a page or cut off in an image is marked [...].
Source
Registro Civil de Guantánamo (Juzgado Municipal de Guantánamo), libros de nacimientos, 1885 onward. Images donated to the Cuba Research Project by Roza (November 2026).
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