The "Memories Of Milton S. Hershey: Part I - Cuba" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Just printed out a story I found online telling about chocolatier Milton S. Hershey and his coconnecton to the Cuban town now known as Camilo Cienfuegos.  I recently read about his connection to the little town of Mount Joy in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, but had no idea he had connections in Cuba.  It was in the little town, on the northern coast of Cuba, that Mr. Hershey built a sugar refinery to supply sugar for his growing chocolate empire in Hershey, Pennsylvania.  The town dates back to 1916 when Mr. Hershey first visited Cuba for the first time and decided to buy a sugar plantation and mill on the island to supply his growing chocolate empire in Pennsylvania.  

Hershey's Sugar Refinery in Hershey, Cuba

It was on land east of Havana that he built a large sugar refinery and an adjoining village and named it Hershey, Cuba.  The village was modeled after the town he was in the process of building in Hershey, PA.  The houses were for his workers and their families.  The Cuban village would eventually have about 160 homes made of wooden planks and built along a grid of streets, each with a small yard and front porches just as the homes he had built in Hershey, PA for his workers at his chocolate factory.  

Some of the homes in Hershey Village, Cuba

The small Cuban town also had it's own rail line, a public school, a medical clinic, shops, a movie theatre, a golf course, social clubs and a baseball stadium where the local Hershey-sponsored team played their home games.  The factory was one of the most productive refineries in all of Cuba as well as one of the best in Latin America.  It was the envy of all who lived in Cuba.  Mr. Hershey wanted the best for his workers so they would give him the best work performance they could.  His company owned all the properties in the village and made all the home repairs and maintained the public utilities.  

The train line that was built to get the sugar to ports.

Mr. Hershey knew how to keep his workers happy and productive.  Recently, a Mr. Pedro Gonzalez Bernal, a life-long resident of the village and a radio journalist, whose father worked as a conductor on the rail line that Mr. Hershey had built to connect the refinery with the port of Matanzas, said that the town was a world apart from the rest of Cuba.  But, at the time there was also racial segregation throughout the small town with black workers assigned the smallest homes on the farthest edge of town.  Three years after  Mr. Hershey died in 1945, Hershey Company sold the Cuban plant and village along with Hershey's other Cuban holdings.  When Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, the refinery was nationalized and the town was renamed Camilo Cienfuegos after one of Castro's commanders.  

Remains of the baseball stadium.

With Hershey's death and Castro coming to power came changes and all home owners in the town were now responsible for their own homes and the baseball stadium was demolished.  But the sugar refinery remained among the backbones of the economy of Cuba.  But the Cuban sugar industry declined after the collapse of the Soviet Union, its principal sponsor.  Eventually Mr. Hershey's sugar refinery was closed in the early 2000s when many of the sugar plants were closed by the government.  Cuba did find jobs for the workers and even sent some to school to train for jobs with many going into the tourism industry.  Recently, most of the sugar factory's buildings have been demolished, but the homes still remain with residents trying to keep them up even though they have very little help doing so.  Mr. Hershey would be rolling over in his grave if he knew what had happened to his grand experiment he had instituted in Cuba.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.