page_title: Camagüey
section_title: Notable residents
hierarchical_section_title: Camagüey / Notable residents
caption_attribution_description: English: The statue of Ignacio Agramonte on the Plaza de Revolucìon in Camagüey. I took the picture.
context_page_description: Camagüey is a city and municipality in central Cuba and is the nation's third-largest city with more than 321,000 inhabitants. It is the capital of the Camagüey Province.
  It was founded as Santa María del Puerto del Príncipe in 1514, by Spanish colonists on the northern coast and moved inland in 1528, to the site of a Taino village named Camagüey. It was one of the seven original settlements founded in Cuba by the Spanish. After Henry Morgan burned the city in the 17th century, it was redesigned like a maze so attackers would find it hard to move around inside the city.
  The symbol of the city of Camagüey is the clay pot or tinajón, used to capture rain water and keep it fresh. Camagüey is also the birthplace of Ignacio Agramonte, an important figure of the Ten Years' War against Spain. A monument by Italian sculptor Salvatore Buemi, erected in the center of the area to Ignacio Agramonte, was unveiled by his wife in 1912. It is composed of an equestrian statue, reliefs in bronze that reveal fragments of the life of Agramonte, and a sculpture of a woman that symbolizes the motherland.
  In July 2008, the old town was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
context_section_description: Camagüey is the birthplace of professional boxer Luis Ortiz (1979).
  Camagüey is also the birthplace of Ignacio Agramonte (1841), an important figure of the Ten Years' War against Spain between 1868 and 1878. Agramonte drafted the first Cuban Constitution in 1869, and later, as a Major General, formed the fearsome Camagüey cavalry corps that had the Spaniards on the run. He died in combat on May 11, 1873; his body was burned in the city because the Spanish feared the rebels would attack the city to recover his body.
  The outline of Ignacio Agramonte's horseback statue in the Park that bears his name is a symbol of Camagüey. It was set there in 1911, uncovered by his widow, Amalia Simoni.
  Artists include José Iraola, a contemporary painter who was born in Camagüey, on September 19, 1961, and sculptor Roberto Estopiñán, born in Camagüey, in 1921.
  Poets and writers include Brígida Agüero y Agüero (1837-1866) and Domitila García Doménico de Coronado (1847-1938). A street in the city has been named for Agüero.
  The city is the birthplace of Major League Baseball Hall of Fame member Atanasio Perez Rigal (Tony Pérez), who won two World Series titles with the Cincinnati Reds and was the 1967 All Star Game MVP.
  The city is also the birthplace of the Cuban national poet Nicolás Guillén, and of Carlos J. Finlay, an outstanding physician and scientist, who first identified the Aedes aegyptis mosquito as the vector of yellow fever.
  Camagüey is also the hometown of volleyball player Mireya Luis, Gertrudis Gomez de Avellanada (poet), Silvestre de Balboa (1563–1649, writer), Salvador Cisneros Betancourt, Marqués de Santa Lucia (Cuban patriot, signatory of the Guaimaro Constitution of 1869 and President of the Cuban Republic in Arms).
  Father José Olallo Valdés worked there, and was beatified in the city on November 29, 2008.
  Olympic champion amateur boxer at 75 kg in Sydney 2000 was Jorge Gutiérrez Espinosa, born on 18 September 1975 in Camagüey.
  It is the birthplace of the Cuban writer Severo Sarduy, a member of the European intellectual community that consolidated in the 1960s behind Tel Quel, a journal of critical thought. Sarduy, censored in Cuba throughout the 20th century, lived in Paris as an exile from 1960 until his death in 1993. He holds the position within literary history of having reformulated the transatlantic reconfigurations of the Hispanic Baroque aesthetic under the term "Neobaroque".
caption: The statue of Ignacio Agramonte
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