Juragua Iron Company mine photographs, 1914

The Juragua Iron Company was the first American company to become interested in iron mining in Cuba. The mines were located in the province of Santiago at the eastern end of Cuba. The Santiago province climate is hot but not affected by fevers or malaria. The company first went to Cuba in the early 1880s to begin iron ore mining. Its capital stock was controlled by the Bethlehem Iron Company of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Steel Company of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It shipped its first iron ore out of Cuba in 1884. This company was the most successful of all the American iron mining companies operating in Cuba in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries. This collection of photographs illustrates in detail the mining operation as an open pit quarry process in the Sierra Maestre Mountains of southeastern Cuba.