La guagua

Hi dear steemians! Today I want to show you a little bit of the evolution of the principal public mean of transportation in Cuba: La Guagua (the bus)

First of all I would like to give you a brief introduction about the origin of the word “guagua” meaning bus in my country of birth as well as in the Canary Islands. This denomination is supposed to come nothing more than from the result of a process of linguistic adaptation in this little story that I tell you next.
Throughout history the legend has been reinforced that the term guagua comes from the name of the first American company to export buses to Cuba and later will also export them to the Canary Islands. We are talking about the Washington, Walton and Company Incorporated, which logo was Wa & Wa Co. Inc. Apparently all buses had the logo inscribed on the sides of it. Once people in the island started seeing them on streets, the next step was to bring them a name, a popular one, and the sound of the abbreviation of the company name was already good. So we adopted it as denomination and then adapted it to the spanish spelling rules, which would be [gua] for the english writing form Wa.

Now we will take a leap in history until the 70s-80s just for you to see how far were we still, after having been the first country in Latin America to use the railroad...
From the next 3 images in the one above on the right I show you the buses Hino that arrived in Cuba from Japan. A little later, the chassis that gave way to the Cuba-made assemblies to manufacture larger buses arrived, the Girón XI was born: images left and down

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Now let's take a look of the biggest invention of the 90s concerning buses, this specifically is not called guagua anymore, but Camello. As you can see in the picture below its name is due to the two humps that its structure presents, it reminds us those of the camels. Its gigantic and spectacularly ugly structure was completely produced in Cuba, taking as basis large pieces of zinc and the hands of metallurgy industry cuban workers. Even being aware that it was very helpful, I need to say that luckily for us, this nightmare came to an end.

In 2005, the first 12 Chinese-made Yutong buses arrived on the island. Months later, an additional 1000 arrived, that made an obvious difference for millions of Cubans throughout the country.
Today we can assure that the popularly known as "guaguas yutong", were the key to the relative improvement of transportation in Cuba. This, along with the disappearance of the much-maligned "camels".

In 2009, 180 million dollars were spent on buses and the director of provincial development assured that "it is a medium-term plan for, in 2012, to satisfy 85 percent of the demand, that is, to transport more than 3.5 million passengers a day. " It was one more of the many unfulfilled promises...

Hope you can enjoy of this post, and don't forget to express your gratitude for every single thing that comes to your life!
Thanks for your time!