This is the story of the guayabera, Cuba's national garment.
The guayabera is made up of four pockets and is decorated with rows of pleats; two rows in the front and three in the back. At one point, the back yoke ended in a single vertex that looked like a triangle that, together with the three rows of pleats, resembled the Cuban flag. It was always white and long-sleeved and had 27 buttons. Thus, the guayabera was slightly fitted at the waist. Over time, the back yoke was topped with three vertices from which the same number of rows of pleats came out and the 27 buttons remained. Today, the guayabera has varied structures, materials and colors. There are embroidered and frayed ones, with more or less pleats and buttons, but it is always the same elegant and fresh garment.
The birth of the guayabera was not the work of a single person and it remains to be determined from when it became an elegant, fresh, white, very well starched and ironed garment that could be worn without a tie.
The earliest graphic testimony of the Guayabera that has come down to us dates back to 1906. But the word Guayabera, as a Cubanism, was not legitimized until 1921, when Constantino Suárez included it in his Cuban Vocabulary.
However, legend has it that a peasant from the Sancti Spíritus region, in the center of the island, asked his wife to make him a fresh and comfortable shirt for him to work in the fields. The industrious woman fulfilled the order, without imagining that her design would become so popular that it would be known throughout the world.
It was called guayabera because the peasants used to pick the guavas and put them in the large pockets of their clothes.
Another legend places the origin of the guayabera in the genius of a tailor, also from Sancti Spíritus, who sold long shirts with pockets so that peasants could comfortably store their cigars.
Whatever its origin, the guayabera has been a resounding success, and Sancti Spiritus is apparently its definitive birthplace. There is even a unique guayabera museum.
Made with yarn, fresh, comfortable and elegant, with wide skirts that are always used outside the pants, the guayabera is the most representative garment of Cuba.
The guayabera was very popular during the second half of the Republic, where even presidents came to wear it with pride.
Until then, it was a garment, very generalized and typical of the Cuban peasant, but not of the urban areas and even less of the capital.
It was only around the 1940s that Cubans hung up their jackets, threw away their hats, untied their ties and, finally relieved of these clothes brought from a climate that was not ours, they ended up assimilating with approval the freshness and elegance of the guayabera.
La Guayabera after the triumph of the revolution
When the Revolution triumphed, the guayabera receded until it disappeared. At that time, the country suffered economic aggression, sabotage, invasions and terrorist acts and suffered from deficiencies of all kinds.
In the late 70s, the guayabera timidly reappeared with long sleeves and pleats. It was not made of thread, but of polyester, and not always white. It did not take long for young people to begin to see it, not without rejection, as a symbol of the bureaucrat in office.
Fortunately, its use has been revitalized in recent times, thanks mainly to cultural promotion for tourist purposes, it is true. What matters, however, is that Cubans, and even Cuban women, have finally rediscovered the taste for wearing the famous shirt and its popularity has thus been revived among their fellow citizens.
It is the guayabera, the national garment of the country, symbol of Cubanness that identifies us throughout the world.
So do not leave Cuba without such a shirt which, like the skin of a nation, will later give you back the nostalgic and warm memory of a trip among the Cubans.
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